Hot dust, meet cold water
Our planet assembled itself from the leftovers of a young star: grit, ice, and metal pulled together by gravity until the middle grew hot enough to melt. Early on, something about the size of Mars struck it a glancing blow, and the debris thrown into orbit gathered into the moon.1 For a long while the sky was full of falling stone, some of it carrying water; when that eased, steam condensed and the low ground filled up. The planet became an ocean interrupted by volcanoes. In that water, chemistry crossed a threshold: a molecule started copying itself, using instructions stored inside its own structure. That was the beginning of life, and it did not stop.2
- 13.8 billion years ago The universe begins
- 4.5 billion years ago Earth forms; the moon crashes in
- 3.7 billion years ago First life in the ocean
- 541 million years ago The Cambrian explosion of animals
- 375 million years ago Life walks onto land
- 66 million years ago A meteor ends the dinosaurs
The laser, the blanket, the egg
Some of those cells learned to harvest sunlight and released oxygen as waste. Over unimaginable stretches of time the atmosphere changed, the sky turned blue, and a layer of ozone formed high above the surface — which mattered, because until then dry land was bathed in hard ultraviolet light. With that shield in place, plants could spread onto the continents, and animals followed. The first land animals still had to return to water to breed; the solution was the shelled egg, a private pond carried inland. Freed from the shoreline, vertebrates radiated into every habitat, grew enormous, and for a while insects were the size of dinner plates. Then a rock from space ended the age of dinosaurs, the small warm-blooded survivors diversified, and one lineage learned to stand upright, carry tools, control fire, and speak. That lineage is us, and the rest of this page is its record.