depict Earth's long-term future by comparing its lifespan to that of a typical human's, pointing out that its systems that keep it habitable will gradually break down one by one, like organs in a human as he or she dies. They also predict the Earth's eventual fate by compressing its eventual 12 billion-year-old history to a clock spanning 12 hours, with the first life appearing at 1:00 am, and the first animals and plants appearing at 4:00 am, with the present day being 4:29.59 am; and even though the Earth will be destroyed by the Sun at "high noon", animals and plants will come to an end by 5:00 am. The book picks up where Rare Earth leaves off, this time talking about how and why the Earth and its ability to support complex and especially intelligent life is actually not just rare in space, but also in time. See also Future of the Earth. According to Ward's 2007 book, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, all but one of the major mass extinction events in history have been brought on by climate change. The author argues that events in the past can give valuable information about the future of our planet. Reviewer Doug Brown goes further, stating "this is how the world ends." Scientists at the Universities of York and Leeds also warn that the fossil record supports evidence of impending mass extinction. Recently, Ward is slowly starting to shift his interest toward climate change because of his experiences with studying mass extinctions, as well as justifying why intelligent life, including humanity, is especially even rarer than complex life in general in terms of both space and time, as intelligent life only lasts for just a few thousand years before finally collapsing and going extinct, as seen in the book The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps, which documents the effects of ongoing and future man-made climate change. However, in 2014, Ward returned to his roots as a paleontologist with his book A New History of Life, co-authored with Joe Kirschvink, and in his 2018 book, Lamarck's Revenge. Ward is the father of indie musician and producer Nick Ward of Seattle band Hey Marseilles. Medea hypothesis The Medea hypothesis is a term coined by Ward for a hypothesis that contests