Today I want to talk about the history of our earth as a planet.

Earth is special from the other planets in

many different ways. First of all, earth is the only planet in the entire solar system and all the other solar
systems we have studied to have life on it. Scientists believe that a big reason for life being able to exist
on earth is that it lies in what is called the Goldilocks zone. This zone is the spot where water can exist in
liquid zone as it isn’t evaporated into the air due to the nearby sun, nor is it frozen solid due the distance
away from the sun. It’s right in between, just like how the story of Goldilocks goes. If you don’t know
who Goldilocks is, google it. This is an astronomy podcast, not a children’s storybook. But at around 93
million miles away from the sun, Earth is actually right in the center of this Goldilocks zone, which is why
about 71% of earth’s surface is covered in liquid water. However, simply having water does not
necessarily means a planet can support life. There must also be oxygen and other characteristics that
would allow life, at least life as we know it, to survive on such other planets. Kepler 22b is an example of
an exoplanet, that is a planet in another galaxy, that is in the Goldilocks zone of its own star and could
easily support life, but no evidence has been found to suggest that life does exist on this planet. So, for
now, the true reasons that life exists on earth is a mystery.

But earth was not always the wet oasis that we now are so familiar with. In fact, in its early days it was
much more violent and brutal, with many volcanos and frequent collisions from other extra-terrestrial
objects. When earth originally formed with all the other planets 4.6 billion years ago, it was a dry hunk
of rock, with no water on its surface whatsoever. The next 500 years of the Earth’s life are called the
Hadean era. While this era makes up over 10% of Earth’s colorful history, very little is known about it
because few rocks that are present today are known to be older than 3.8 billion years old.

During the Hadean era, earth along with its neighboring planets were pummeled with asteroid collisions
and other such impacts, constantly causing damage to the young planet. This would have made the
surface of our world hellish in nature, which is why this era is actually named after the Greek lord of the
underworld: Hades. It is also thought that a particularly large collision during this era catapulted pieces
of the earth into space, where they condensed together to form our moon. Most of these collisions are
thought to have been performed by asteroids over 25 miles in diameter, which is much bigger than the
asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs, which was thought to only be 8 or 9 miles wide. At least 70
dinosaur killing impacts hit earth during this era, with the largest having enough energy to kill the
dinosaurs 500 times over. It is also believed that some of the particularly large craters currently present
on earth, such as the enormous 112-mile-wide Vredefort crater in South Africa, were created in this era.
These collisions also buried the surface of the earth with new debris over and over again, which helps
explain why there isn’t much rock available from this time period.

But despite everything I’ve just told you, the Hadean era actually want all that bad. That’s because a
very important item arrived on Earth’s surface during this period: water. Asteroids weren’t the only
thing slamming onto earth’s surface, comets were as well. Comets are basically dirty snowballs with
much frozen ice. When these comets then collided with the earth, they deposited that frozen ice onto
the surface of the planet where it melted and became liquid water. Without the collisions in the Hadean
era, water would never have arrived at earth and life may have never developed.

Additionally, many other important phenomena took place during the Hadean era. Mantle convection
picks up, and because the earth was so much hotter during this era, many small tectonic plates were
created, which moved around relatively rapidly. The initial crust, formed when the Earth's surface first
solidified, totally disappeared from a combination of this fast Hadean plate tectonics and the intense
impacts of the Late Heavy Bombardment. It also caused changes to the atmosphere. Before, our planet’s
atmosphere was composed of light elements from the solar nebula, mostly hydrogen and helium. But
due to all the impacts and volcanic activity taking place on its surface, Earth released a lot of volatile
gasses creating a atmosphere that was rich in greenhouse gasses. It was still fairly poor in oxygen, but it
definitely had a lot more than the previous atmosphere. Additionally, some theories suggest that
reactions in the greenhouse gas atmosphere produced many of the amino acids and other vital building
blocks for life. Experiments have actually shown that such molecules could form in an atmosphere of
water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen with the aid of sparks to mimic the effect of lightning.

And after the Hadean era, clouds started to form! Rain filled up the oceans and the planet cooled down
considerably, making it much more conducive to life. This was only possible because of the collisions
during the Hadean era which brought water to our planet, as well as the greenhouse gasses in the
atmosphere that kept these gasses in liquid form.

So when things finally started to calm down, earth was ready for simple life forms. And it is certainly
possible that life could have existed as early 4.1 billion years ago, however the oldest concrete evidence
for living organisms dates back to 3.7 billion years ago. These life forms were single celled microscopic
organism and we only know of their existence thanks to carbon signals left on rocks by these microbes.
But one thing about the earth at this time is that there wasn’t much oxygen in the atmosphere at the
time, it was mostly composed of methane. For this reason, these microbes were sparse and lived in their
own small isolated colonies.

One interesting debate going on between geologists and astronomers if whether the first forms of life
were RNA based or protein based or lipid based. Basically, which if these vital processes and building
blocks for life popped up first. The discovery that a kind of RNA molecule called a ribozyme can catalyze
both its own replication and the construction of proteins led to the hypothesis that earlier life-forms
were based entirely on RNA. They could have formed an RNA world in which there were individuals but
no species, as mutations and horizontal gene transfers would have meant that the offspring in each
generation were quite likely to have different genomes from those that their parents started with. RNA
would later have been replaced by DNA, which is more stable and therefore can build longer genomes,
expanding the range of capabilities a single organism can have. Although short, self-replicating RNA
molecules have been artificially produced in laboratories, doubts have been raised about whether
natural non-biological synthesis of RNA is possible. This brings me to the protein based argument. We
know for a fact that amino acids, the building blocks for proteins, could exist during this time. Most of
the steps in their assembly required temperatures of about 100 °C (212 °F) and moderate pressures.
Hence, self-sustaining synthesis of proteins could have occurred near hydrothermal vents. A difficulty
with the protein scenario is finding a way for organisms to evolve. Without the ability to replicate as
individuals, aggregates of molecules would have "compositional genomes" (counts of molecular species
in the aggregate) as the target of natural selection. Finally, is the lipid based argument. It has been
suggested that double-walled "bubbles" of lipids like those that form the external membranes of cells
may have been an essential first step. Experiments that simulated the conditions of the early Earth have
reported the formation of lipids, and these can spontaneously form liposomes, double-walled "bubbles",
and then reproduce themselves. Although they are not intrinsically information-carriers as nucleic acids
are, they would be subject to natural selection for longevity and reproduction. Nucleic acids such as RNA
might then have formed more easily within the liposomes than they would have outside. But no matter
what form of life was first, the other quickly followed and bacteria sporadically populated our planet.
But then, 2.4 billion years ago, something remarkable happened. Through genetic mutations and general
evolution, a new type of bacteria evolved. These bacteria were called cyanobacteria, named as such due
to the fact that they form blue-green layers on the surface of lakes and ponds. These bacteria were the
first every photo-synthesizers, making food by taking in the plentiful water and sunlight that they had.
These photo-synthesizers then released a great amount of oxygen into the atmosphere, causing it to
become more conducive to more advanced life forms. However, this sudden, dramatic rise in oxygen,
made the environment less hospitable for other microbes that could not tolerate oxygen, causing them
to die off.

Evidence for this Great Oxidation Event is recorded in changes in seafloor rocks. When oxygen is around,
iron reacts chemically with it, it gets oxidized and then gets removed from the system. Rocks dating to
before the event are striped with bands of iron. Rocks dating to after the event do not have iron bands,
showing that oxygen was now in the picture. The burst of oxygen also caused the planet to cool down as
it decreased the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

But then something weird happened. After this initial burst of oxygen, evidence shows that the oxygen
stabilized at lower levels than before. It was still much greater than what it was at before the arrival of
the cyanobacteria, but not as high as it was when these bacteria first started photosynthesizing.
Scientists are not 100% sure why this happened, though some believe that perhaps the death and
decomposition of the cyanobacteria caused the levels of methane to instead rise, decreasing the oxygen
percentage.

But as time went on life continued to evolve. Single celled organisms grouped together and eventually
formed multicellular organisms, and then animals, the most notable of which are sponges. Now you
might be sitting there thinking, “what’s so special about sea sponges? Don’t they just kinda sit there in
the ocean?” And while that is true, sea sponges do a lot of sitting in the ocean, they also caused another
important change to the earth’s atmosphere. These sponges did not need much oxygen to live due to
their simple structure, but they consumed dying microbes, preventing them from releasing more
methane into the atmosphere. This the flipped the script and caused the oxygen production levels to
exceed the methane production levels, until finally the composition of earth’s atmosphere was starting
to look more like it is today. Now the earth could finally support oxygen-based life and during the
Camrbian period, 541-485 million years ago, a huge explosion of different types of animals and
organisms occurred, paving the way for future evolution. The first 4 legged animals popped up, as well
as the first vertebrae and a bunch of different ocean animals.

After that, the colonization of land finally occurred. Life evolved to not only exist in the oceans but on
the land as well. Plate tectonics allowed for the creation of huge supercontinents, which split apart and
then reformed. There were hundreds of thousands of new species that developed, as well as a couple of
mass extinction events thrown in for good measure. But the earth became much more like it was today.
I hope you enjoyed learning about the history of our planet as a whole. I find it super interesting to see
how life evolved from tiny bacteria to the complex thing it is today. And who knows, perhaps other
planets also have life on them just like ours does.