What if the Earth had never breathed? What if no creature had ever burrowed in the soil, swum through ancient seas, or flown across primordial skies? The planet you would encounter would be unrecognisable — not simply barren, but deadly.
That was the provocation with which Dr Olivia Judson opened her lecture at this year’s Ukrainian History: Global Initiative conference in Kyiv. For the second year running, the event brought together scholars, diplomats, cultural leaders, journalists and public intellectuals to look at Ukraine’s past from new and often radical perspectives.
This year’s focus was humanity’s earliest history — and the ways in which we can know it. Judson, evolutionary biologist and author of the bestselling Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex, turned her attention to the origins of life itself.
She describes life not as a passive outcome of geology, but as a “geological force” — an agent powerful enough to have built, reshaped and maintained the world we inhabit.
Judson’s framework rests on what she calls five great expansions of energy available to life. Each, she argues, transformed not only the organisms that harnessed it but the planet as a whole. “My role,” she acknowledged, “was to synthesise the work of generations of scientists before me” — among them Volodymyr Vernadsky, the first president of Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences. Nearly a century ago, in his landmark book The Biosphere, Vernadsky wrote: “The planet has no chemical force more constant than life itself.”
The lineage of discovery stretches back further still. In 1890, the Ukrainian microbiologist Serhii Vynogradsky overturned the assumption that all life ultimately depended on sunlight. Working with soil bacteria, he demonstrated that organisms could synthesise organic matter entirely without the sun’s help.
“In this presentation, we have a completely different vision of what life on Earth means,” said Timothy Snyder, chair of the project’s International Academic Council. “Earth is no longer a backdrop for life. Earth is created — or co-created — by life.”
If planets are not simply inert stages for biology but co-evolving systems shaped by billions of years of interaction, Snyder added, then ours is not just one generic world among many: “It means this is a historically specific planet — not one of countless interchangeable ones.”
Judson’s collaboration with the Ukrainian History: Global Initiative aims to stitch together the deepest possible sense of time. Her work promises to illuminate how geological and biological forces combined to shape the territories of Ukraine over billions of years — and how distinctive ecological factors made these lands unique in human history.
