FIELD NOTES
Date: time=0 to 2020 AD
Site: the Universe
Subject: Natural History
Participants: C. Monroe
The Universe began with a bang. About 13.7 billion years ago, all of the matter in the universe exploded into existence in a single tremendous burst of energy. A few hundred million years later, the first stars had formed. And many billions of years after that, the first planets.
Our planet, Earth, was formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago. A wide disk of gas and rock was orbiting around a newly-formed star. Today, we call that star the Sun. Over time, bits of those rocks began to stick together, to form larger and larger bodies in space. Eventually those bodies became planets. One of those planets was our Earth.
At the beginning of its life, Earth was a violent place. Volcanoes blasted from the surface and asteroids fell from the sky. Some of the asteroids that hit Earth contained water. When they smashed into the ground, the water was thrown into the sky as a vapor, or gas. As the Earth cooled, this water vapor condensed and fell to the ground as rain. Even as the first oceans began to form, however, lava still flowed. Earth experienced near-constant volcanic eruptions for almost 700 million years.
As the planet cooled and oceans formed, life on Earth began. No one knows exactly how. But somehow, deep within those primordial oceans, matter came together to form one-celled organisms that could absorb energy and reproduce. And from those single cells, the whole great train of evolution began rolling.
That’s when things really got interesting.
Marginal comment: 13.7 billion years. Compared to that, even my great travels have covered only the blink of an eye in the history of the Universe.
Want to learn more? Check out these sources!
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/timeline-2006121889912.html
https://thewire.in/science/a-brief-history-of-the-earth-how-it-all-began