Index
Every Earth Log inscribed so far, in the order it was written. Click any entry to read it.
A Voice Across Time
The opening entry of the Earth Log Project. It introduces the planet, the species, and the purpose of the logs: a chronological record of human civilization, written during the lifetime of its author, permanently inscribed on the BSV blockchain, and addressed both to readers in the present and to any reader — human, post-human, artificial, or otherwise — who might one day encounter it. The entry also sets out the Earth Log Oath: to record events as honestly as the author can understand them at the time they occur, to distinguish observation from interpretation from speculation, and never to alter earlier entries once they have been recorded.
The War Between Iran, Israel, and the United States
Written in the second week of a war that began on the 28th of February 2026. The original plan for the project was a slow introduction to humanity, but the unfolding events made an immediate record necessary. The entry describes the strategic role of the Middle East in the modern energy system, the risk that the conflict expands beyond the region, the danger of nuclear weapons in such a moment, and the broader shift toward a multipolar global order in which the institutions established after the Second World War appear to be losing influence.
The Origins of the Universe
A step back from current events to the deepest time the project will cover. The entry presents the early-21st-century scientific account of cosmic origins: the Big Bang approximately 13.8 billion years ago, the formation of the first atoms during recombination, the emergence of the first stars and galaxies, the birth of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago, the formation of Earth, and the giant-impact origin of the Moon. The entry also introduces the Subject Timeframe metadata field, allowing readers to orient themselves across the vast time scales the corpus moves between.
The Origin of Life
The first entry in the How We Came About series. It covers the conditions on Earth before life appeared, the principle that atoms naturally arrange themselves into stable structures wherever they find themselves, the experimental evidence that the building blocks of life form readily under early-Earth conditions (Miller–Urey, the Murchison meteorite), candidate settings in which life may first have appeared (warm pools, hydrothermal vents, the deep crust, panspermia), the appearance of the first molecule capable of copying itself, and the leading hypothesis that an early RNA world preceded the DNA-and-protein biology of every cell alive today.
Inheritance and Change
Genetics. The entry describes Mendel's discovery that traits are inherited as discrete particles, the mid-twentieth-century identification of DNA as the molecule of heredity, the structure of the double helix, the genetic code by which a sequence of four chemical letters encodes the proteins of every living thing, the role of chromosomes and cell division, the workings of dominance and recessiveness, the mechanisms by which children differ from their parents, and the modern additions that have reshaped the picture: epigenetics, the function of non-coding DNA, horizontal gene transfer between unrelated lineages, and CRISPR-based gene editing.
Evolution by Natural Selection
The Darwin and Wallace mechanism set out plainly: variation, heritability, and differential reproduction, applied with patience to a population of replicators on a planet of finite resources. The entry covers selection observed in living populations within human lifetimes (peppered moths, antibiotic resistance, the Galápagos finches, Lenski's long-running E. coli experiment), sexual selection, the formation of new species from old ones, the doctrine of common descent, the structure of the tree of life and the last universal common ancestor at its root, and the major refinements added since 1858: population genetics, genetic drift, neutral theory, evolutionary developmental biology, and the extended evolutionary synthesis.
The First Two Billion Years
The longest single stretch of life's history on Earth, covered as a single entry. The first cells around 3.5 billion years ago, the chemistry that prokaryotic life worked out during this period (most of the metabolic toolkit still used by every living thing today), the invention of photosynthesis and its planetary consequences (the Great Oxygenation Event, the rusting of the oceans, the formation of the ozone layer, the long Huronian glaciation), the appearance of the eukaryotic cell through the absorption of one cell into another, the second similar event that gave plants and many algae their photosynthesising machinery, and the first appearances of sexual reproduction and of multicellular life.
The Long March Onto Land
The four-hundred-million-year stretch during which life on Earth left the microscopic and the aquatic and became visible above the tideline. The deep-freeze Cryogenian glaciations that preceded it, the strange first macroscopic forms of the Ediacaran period, the sudden appearance of nearly every modern animal body plan in the Cambrian Explosion, the first vertebrates as small jawless fish in the Cambrian seas, the colonisation of the dry continents by plants in the Ordovician and the building of the first forests in the Devonian, the move of arthropods onto land, the fish-to-tetrapod transition, and the appearance of the amniotic egg that finally let the descendants of fish reproduce away from standing water.
The Mammal Line
The two and a half hundred million years during which two branches of the early amniote line — synapsids and sauropsids — shared the world. The Permian dominance of the synapsids and the catastrophic Permian–Triassic extinction that ended their reign, the Triassic recovery and the rise of the dinosaurs, the long Mesozoic shadow under which the early mammals lived for more than a hundred and thirty million years, the appearance of birds within the feathered theropods, the rise of the flowering plants, the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous that ended the non-avian dinosaurs, and the explosive radiation of the surviving mammals into nearly every ecological niche the dinosaurs had left empty — including the small, tree-dwelling lineage that would become the primates.
Becoming Human
The closing entry of the detailed How We Came About science series. The split of the human lineage from the chimpanzees about seven million years ago, the earliest hominin candidates, the firm establishment of habitual upright walking in the australopithecines (Lucy, the Laetoli footprints), the first stone tools at three and a third million years ago, the appearance of the genus Homo, the more derived Homo erectus and the first departure from Africa, the control of fire, the mid-Pleistocene world in which several human species lived simultaneously, the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa about three hundred thousand years ago, the spread of modern humans across every continent except Antarctica by the end of the last ice age, the genetic record of admixture with Neanderthals and Denisovans preserved in the genomes of living people, and the unbroken chain of ancestors that connects every reader of the corpus to the first replicator on the early Earth.
The Short Story of How We Came About
A citation-free plain-prose retelling of the entire science arc as a single self-contained narrative, written for two kinds of reader: the present-day reader who wants the shape of the story without the apparatus, and the far-future reader who may no longer share the academic context the detailed entries assume. The entry covers, in plain language, the same ground EL #0003 through EL #0010 covers in detail: the Big Bang, the formation of stars and galaxies and the heavier elements, the formation of Earth and the Moon, the appearance of the first replicating molecule on the early Earth, the mechanism of evolution by natural selection, the first cells, the rise of photosynthesis and the remaking of the planet's atmosphere, the appearance of complex cells and of bodies built of many cells, the move onto land, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, the radiation of the mammals, the appearance of the primates, the human lineage, and the close of the last ice age.
The Strait, the Off-Ramp, and a World on Hold
A current-affairs update inscribed eight weeks into the war first recorded in EL #0002. The entry covers Iran's partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz in early March, the United States counter-blockade, the resulting disruption to the global supply of oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and nitrogen-based fertilizers, the cascading effects on energy prices, food prices, and global economic stability, and the deeper political and historical context of the conflict — the strategic line set out in the 1996 Clean Break document and the wider seven-country target list associated with later analytical work, the 2015 nuclear agreement that the United States later withdrew from, and the 1953 overthrow of an elected Iranian prime minister by British and American intelligence services. The entry closes with what is visible from Europe at the moment of writing.
Register of Inscriptions
The first Register of Inscriptions. A meta-entry that lists every Earth Log committed to the BSV blockchain up to the date of its own inscription, recording for each one the EL-ID, the date inscribed, the title, the BSV transaction identifier, and the tipping address designated for the author of that entry. The Register is the corpus's table of contents at a moment in time — a single point at which a reader can survey the corpus in full and verify any individual entry directly on chain. New Registers will be inscribed at intervals as the corpus grows; each one snapshots the corpus at the moment of its inscription and remains a valid pointer to that subset forever.
Chapter Summaries
The first Chapter Summaries. A meta-entry that gives, in one paragraph for each preceding Earth Log, a brief account of what that entry is about. Where the Register tells a reader which entries exist and how to verify each one on chain, Chapter Summaries describe what each entry is about in plain prose, in enough detail to orient a reader before they read any individual entry in full. Because each Earth Log is permanently inscribed as it is completed, this synopsis-style record can only be assembled after the entries it covers — a reader assembling the corpus offline may place the most recent Chapter Summaries entry at the front of their reading and use it as a normal book synopsis.
How to Read an Earth Log
The first Earth Log Reader's Guide. A reader-facing primer addressed both to readers living in the author's time and to readers who may discover these inscriptions long after. The entry explains what an Earth Log is, the anatomy of an entry (metadata block, optional comment, entry body, signature, optional references), and walks through the metadata fields one by one. Two shorter sections then address the present-day reader (how to verify an entry on a block explorer, how the chained-TXID provenance works, where to find the curated reading site at earthlog.earth) and the far-future reader (orientation to the planet, the calendar, the language, and the technology of inscription, with the advice that the inscribed plain-text original is the canonical record if any later translation diverges).
The African Dawn
The opening entry of a new arc, How We Spread Across the Earth — the bridge between the science arc and the coming civilization spine, and the first of three entries that follow our species from its emergence in Africa to its arrival on every habitable continent. Picking up where Becoming Human (#0010) left off, it asks where and how Homo sapiens came to be, what kind of world it shared with the other humans alive alongside it, and why it waited so long before spreading. The entry covers the pushing-back of our species' age to around three hundred thousand years (Jebel Irhoud, Omo Kibish, Florisbad), the shift from a single cradle to a continent-wide "structured population" or weakly structured stem, the slow African flickering of the symbolic mind long before European cave art (McBrearty and Brooks, Pinnacle Point, Blombos Cave), the other kinds of human then sharing the planet (Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, Homo naledi, Homo erectus), the failed early excursions into the Levant, and the long wait before a single successful dispersal — gated by the greening and drying of the Sahara — finally carried a small founding population out of Africa between roughly seventy and fifty thousand years ago. It closes on the founder effect, the Toba question, and the threshold of the great journey.
Out of Africa
The second entry in How We Spread Across the Earth, following directly from The African Dawn (#0016). It traces the one successful dispersal — the single founding band from which essentially every non-African person alive today descends — across the planet between roughly seventy thousand and forty thousand years ago. The entry covers the rapid coastal or "beachcomber" route along the southern rim of Asia, the open-water crossings into Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) across the deep straits of Wallacea, the contested early dates for the first Australians (Madjedbebe), the harder push north into Ice Age Europe and the Asian interior (Grotte Mandrin, Bacho Kiro), and the heart of the arc: the meeting with the other humans already in the land. It sets out the interbreeding that left Neanderthal DNA in every non-African genome today and Denisovan DNA concentrated among the peoples of New Guinea, Australia, and the Philippines (with the Oase man as its vivid face), the disappearance of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and small island humans through some braid of competition, climate, absorption, and chance, and the "flowering" of figurative art on opposite sides of the world at once (Sulawesi, Chauvet, Hohle Fels) — leaving our species, for the first time, effectively the only kind of human left.
Into the New World
The third and final entry in How We Spread Across the Earth, continuing from Out of Africa (#0017) and carrying the story to the completion of the peopling of the Earth, roughly forty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. Unlike the previous entry, it describes a journey into genuine emptiness — a hemisphere where no human, and no member of our genus, had ever set foot. The entry covers the conquest of the deep cold that guarded the way (the eyed needle and tailored clothing, the Ancient North Siberians at the Yana site, the Mal'ta boy and the Ancient North Eurasian ancestry of Native Americans), the drowned country of Beringia and the Beringian Standstill (with Upward Sun River as its face), the contested ways south (the late-opening ice-free corridor versus the coastal "kelp highway"), and the still-moving debate over when people first arrived — the death of "Clovis-first," the pre-Clovis consensus, and the startling Last Glacial Maximum footprints at White Sands. It describes the single founding people from whom most Native Americans descend (and the unresolved "Population Y" signal), the astonishingly fast spread to the southern tip of South America (Monte Verde), and the vanishing of the New World's megafauna in the unresolved tug between overkill and climate — a shadow the entry deliberately carries forward — before closing the human-as-wanderer story and pointing toward the settling and farming to come.
The Short Story of How We Spread Across the Earth
A citation-free plain-prose retelling of the entire How We Spread Across the Earth arc as a single self-contained narrative, compressing The African Dawn (#0016), Out of Africa (#0017), and Into the New World (#0018) into one continuous telling. It is the second entry in the plain-prose companion strand begun by The Short Story of How We Came About (#0011), and does for the peopling of the Earth what that earlier primer did for the long story of how life and mind arose. Written for two kinds of reader — the present-day reader who wants the shape of the story without the apparatus, and the far-future reader for whom it is a self-sufficient backup of the same account — it covers, in plain language and with deliberately rounded dates, the African origin of our species, the world that once held several kinds of human at once, the long wait and the single band that finally got through the gate, the coastal spread and the first sea crossings to Australia, the interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans and the disappearance of the other humans, the learning of the Arctic cold and the forging of the first Americans in Beringia, the walk into the empty hemisphere and the vanishing of its giants, and the completion of the journey — closing on the image of an unbroken road of footsteps and boats running back from wherever the reader stands to a single African beginning.