The Array's Earth catalog was not small.
Lucy rendered it section by section, the holographic display expanding and reorganizing as each layer populated, and Liam stood in front of it and read without speaking.
The geological record came first. Four and a half billion years of planetary history compressed into clean data columns — formation, cooling, the first chemical precursors to what would eventually become biology, the mass extinction events marked in sequence with their causes and their aftermaths. Five major extinctions. The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ended the dominant vertebrate lineage of that period. The Permian event 252 million years ago that the array noted had come closest to sterilizing the surface entirely — 96 percent of marine species, 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate species, gone inside a geological instant.
The planet had nearly ended several times and had not ended.
Liam read the extinction record without expression.
