Final Presentation: Tree of Life in The Library of Babel

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For our final project we made our own tree of life that would reconcile the lack of chance in prior trees of life and eliminate the known foundational source in other trees. The milky way motif used demonstrates how amazing it is that we even exist on the speck that is Earth with respect to the size of the universe. At each division of rays we have a major event that changed the history of the Earth. The first division is the P/T mass extinction in which 95% of life died. The path not taken shows many of the animals that would rule the Earth today had they not gone extinct at this boundary. The next division is the K/T boundary when the dinosaurs went extinct. Radiating from this division is a path of dinosaurs. The path of mankind divides once more with the invention of the printing press separating fiction from real life as the publication of materials allows us to live in a world beyond our own. Thus our tree shows not just what the Earth is today but also what it could have been.

Project by Sarah Schnellbacher and Victoria Lopez.