#2: My 16-million-great grandfather was a fish

When we look at the language of genomes - those endless lines of A's, G', T's and C's that make up the DNA of all living things - then compare those genomes to more ancient primitive forms - we can see that we share 'words', 'sentences' and even 'paragraphs' with them. There is a bit of those older beings at the core of us all you see. The more the words, sentences and paragraphs of our genome match up with another species, the more we share its characteristics. That's why if we read our genome like a book, then a chimpanzee or bonobo's book would be the exact same book with some edits for flavour. Not that those edits aren't hugely significant.

You are never alone really, because every single living thing on earth is related to you. We are all cousins, be they close or distant; one big, estranged family.

Life appears to have only emerged once in the last 4 billion years, when the common ancestor of all living things began to forge a chemical process that would one day shape the entire planet - self-replicating life. For this to have happened only once, in such a vast time period, seriously questions whether it will have happened anywhere else in the cosmos at all.

For a good 3 billion of Life's years - three quarters of all life - there were only single celled lifeforms. For the next half a billion years there was little that you might call sentience. Only in the last half billion years have creatures reached such sixe and complexity. So if life does exist elsewhere in the cosmos, there's a pretty good chance it's single-celled and there's little chance that its found its way to language or space travel.

You were born in an unbroken line of ancestors from the very beginning of life on Earth - there was no break or interruption. If you could wander through your own family tree, back through the generations - your grandparents, their parents, and their parents' parents, and so on - you would keep on going back, back, back through generations until those sets of parents started to look rather odd, with ape-like faces, becoming more rodent-like as you walked onward, beginning eventually to take on uncannily reptile-like features - and on, and on - until all of the people in your family tree began to look distinctly fishy (they'd be living and breathing in the sea of course). There you could meet the ever-so-many-times-parents of the parents of the parents of your parents. And it wouldn't stop there, you could keep on going until your many-great grandparents were nothing but odd lifeforms, clusters of cells, and single cells drifting on the oceans currents.

What's really crazy: through those 4 billion years, all of those parents you encountered as you walked through time, back through the generations - they all had at least one child that lived long enough to have children themselves, in one unimaginable unbroken chain from the original ancestor to you. Its an almost impossible thing that you are here now when you think about it.

Hundreds of millions of species have been and gone through extinction, and each of those species has given life to countless billions of billions of indivuduals, all of whom have died through the passage of time. All of these human people, half-mammal-half-reptile people, funny little sea-worm people, they've all had lives - real lives that they lived long enough to have kids. They've all had their parents die, each and every one of them. Even just Homo sapiens, that's a good 12,000 generations or more of people, who lived a life and brought up at least one child that lived to have at least one child, and so on. And all of those children lost their parents - some at birth, brought up by relatives or fending for themselves; some saw their parents grow old and die. All of that love and care and loss and pain. How can we ever do it justice? How can I capture these ideas in an hour long piece of theatre? I don't know - not yet - but I'm going to have fun trying.