This video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, a German organization dedicated to science education. This animated video’s goal is to show all of earth’s history in 60 minutes. It’s a bit monotonous, but that’s partly what makes it interesting. What the video demonstrates is just how much of earth’s history is devoid of the plants and animals we think of as nature. Bacteria first evolved about four billion years ago, only about half a billion years after earth’s formation. But as the video points out, for more than three billion years, life was invisible to the naked eye.
If you were an explorer going planet to planet in the galaxy, you would in all likelihood have said, “Well, nothing interesting here,” and moved on.
It wasn’t until about 600 million years ago that the change that interests us started to happen when multicellular life forms evolved. Within the next 50 million years all kinds of plants and invertebrate animals evolved and by 500 million years ago, the earliest fish-like vertebrates were already swimming around the oceans.
And if you’re wondering where people are in this representative 61-minute history of the earth, we appear somewhere in about the last 30 seconds. That’s it.
