Eleven Seconds Before Midnight

What if everything you were taught about humanity's place in the universe was not wrong, but simply too small? In Eleven Seconds Before Midnight, scientist, entrepreneur, and lifelong observer of the natural world Dr. Farshad Shishehchian takes the reader on a journey that begins on a rooftop in northwestern Iran and ends at the most urgent question of our time: what kind of species must we become if we are to survive what is coming? Drawing on thirty-five years of working with nature across four continents, and on the latest evidence from cosmology, evolutionary biology, and the growing body of government-acknowledged research into unidentified phenomena beyond our atmosphere, Dr. Shishehchian builds a case that is as scientifically grounded as it is philosophically fearless.This is not a book about despair. It is a book about scale, and what becomes possible when a species finally sees itself clearly. At once a work of popular science, comparative philosophy, and civilizational argument, Eleven Seconds Before Midnight asks the reader to hold two truths at once: that we are vanishingly small in a universe of incomprehensible vastness, and that this smallness, properly understood, is not a reason for humility alone, it is a call to greatness. For readers of Carl Sagan, Yuval Noah Harari, and Michio Kaku, this is a rare debut: the work of a man who has spent a lifetime in the field, across cultures, across continents, and across the full complexity of the living world, and who has finally sat down to tell us what he has seen. Read more