Earth's Evolution in 10 Minutes

in the past few billion years Earth has been pummeled by asteroids crashed into other planets and frozen over several times not to mention being ruled by all kinds of crazy life forms sometimes it's a wonder that our blue home world has survived at all but if we want to take a whirlwind tour of our planet's history we'll have to start way back at the very beginning some 4 and A2 billion years ago our solar system began to emerge out of a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust This Cloud collapsed into a swirling disc of

matter that got hotter and hotter and hotter until hydrogen fused into helium and just like that our son was born and baby Earth was on its way too after the birth of our star all the matter on the farthest ends of the spinning disc began to Clump together these clumps would be the seedlings for the planets and moons in our solar system as they accumulated more matter they grew bigger and more spherical the clumps in the cooler regions of the solar system were mostly made of ice liquids and gases closer to the Sun all the

rocky material formed the inner planets like Mars and Earth this young Earth was incredibly active volcanically speaking it spewed out gases like hydrogen sulfide methane and carbon dioxide these gases made up the very first atmosphere on our planet early Earth was constantly bombarded by large asteroids and comets and soon Earth experienced an even more violent Collision Thea a planet the size of Mars slammed right into our Young World this epic Collision threw chunks of matter all around Earth's orbit and then gravity bound them together into what we know now as the [Music] moon on this

hot early Earth there were no oceans all water existed as gas but 3.8 billion years ago our planet cooled enough for water to condensate and become liquid the very first primitive ocean covered this young Earth and turned it into a water world H2O is an essential ingredient for creating living things so with all that water life appeared on Earth Earth about 3.7 billion years ago these earliest forms of life were microscopic organisms but it was nearly a billion years after that that some of these organisms changed the course of the [Music] world Earth didn't stay

as a water world very long soon the very first continents emerged from the ancient ocean scientists call them Katon as more and more land Rose from the ocean the very first supercontinent appeared on the planet valbar wasn't exactly a super continent it was pretty small scientists think it was smaller than the continent of [Music] Australia around 2.4 billion years ago cyanobacteria evolved to become our planet's first photosynthesizers finally we had some oxygen producers to make Earth's atmosphere much more hospitable and the rest is history folks just kidding we've still got a long way to go

with all this new oxygen Earth's atmosphere had much lower levels of carbon dioxide and that made the planet icy cold much of our Young World froze over as Earth saw its first ice age now as Earth's atmosphere was changing the continents were moving too they broke up and reassembled into the next supercontinent rodinia rodinia was a real supercontinent it may have been the largest supercontinent to ever cover the planet and life well life finally became more complex but then something happened rodinia broke apart and a new supercontinent assembled this one was called pinosa then between

about 540 and 485 million years ago there was an explosion of new life this time was called the Cambrian explosion and the animals that evolved during this period had hard body parts like shells or spines the most famous of all were the alien looking [Music] trilobites around 440 million years ago the climate suddenly shifted and the temperature of the ocean changed dramatically Earth saw its first mass extinction event this was the or division silurian Extinction and a majority of the life that had been spreading around the planet vanished many of these life forms laid the

foundation for the ecosystems that we have on Earth today somewhere between 420 to 350 million years ago the first trees arose from Earth's soil and the first animals made their way to land [Music] too 250 million years ago the planet was covered by Our Last vast supercontinent Pangia sadly it was also during this period that Earth witnessed the greatest mass extinction event in our history the great dying huge amounts of greenhouse gases and accelerated global warming wiped out about 90% of all species on Earth but this mass extinction helped pave the way for the next

wave of animals to evolve 240 to 2 30 million years ago the first dinosaurs appeared for the next 150 million years they'd rule the land if you were there you'd have witnessed the gigantic sorod Argentinosaurus the largest land animal ever or you might have been chased by one of the earth's greatest apex predators the T-Rex and you'd also witness Pangia breaking up and forming the cont Contin we know today okay you may already know where this is headed 66 million years ago an asteroid slammed into our planet right where Mexico sits now and it coughed

up so much debris into the atmosphere that it blocked out the sun this led to devastating climate changes that caused the dinosaurs to die out in the next wave of merging animals mammals became more [Music] common around 6 million years ago the earliest known humans started walking this world this species was called sahelanthropus though they still likely walked on all fours 4 million years ago early humans began to walk upright and about 1 million years later they developed the first known tools which they used to break things some 800,000 years ago things sparked these early

humans discovered how to control fire and could now cook food and provide themselves with heat their brains continued to evolve now more rapidly than ever these humans learned to interact with each other and the surrounding World in whole new ways then between 40,000 to 15,000 years ago all other human species es besides Homo sapiens went extinct 10,000 years ago Earth saw its earliest Farmers these previously nomadic humans stopped wandering the planet and finally put down their Roots jumping way forward to about 250 years ago the Industrial Revolution took place we went through major technological socioeconomic

and cultural Transformations rural based Farm societies became more industrialized Urban ones our human population continued to grow by 1804 we reached 1 billion by 1927 we'd hit 2 billion and since the 1960s the global population has risen faster and faster to where it is now at over 8 billion people and now there's a new threat to human existence and many other forms of life here on Earth climate change temperatures and sea levels are rising worldwide and biodiversity is declining we could be on the verge of another mass extinction event if things don't change but that's

a story for another what if [Music]