Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2017

The editors of the 2017 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences in their introductory piece, to drive home their point, quote from a song Once in a Lifetime sung by David Byrne and his music band Talking Heads: ‘How did we get here?’. The volume, as the editors tell us, is an attempt to address this fundamental question about how we got here. To me, it is a generic question, not necessarily applicable in the context of this volume. This is a fundamental question that drives the entire enterprise called science and motivates us to keep asking difficult questions about our existence and endlessly explore for answers. Each of the articles in this volume, no doubt, is expected to provide the current status of some aspects of this grand undertaking. We only need to see if this compendium meets those expectations.