Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

PBS had a wonderful series Ancient Earth that covered the geological history of the earth. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/ancient-earth/

My naive understanding was always that the earth or planets just sort of found a natural state of being after a while and were / are just that way now. It's very interesting to see the sea saw type scale of changes that occurred over time.

View on HN

The dynamic nature of the planet earth is likely what drove the evolutionary changes to develop the highly complex life today. In the most stable period of earth’s history, the so called “boring billion,” (Mid Proterozoic) a period of a billion years of a stable environment resulted in extremely slow evolutionary advancements. This period interestingly was bordered by two oxygenation events, the first being the topic of this thread.

This sounds right, but it is speculative at best. If anything it just goes to show how complex the modern cell is and how long it took to assemble all the right pieces.

Like anything else on this topic it is a hypothesis and nothing new:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22695-x

PBS has also done work with their digital studios to present 5 to 10 minute long pieces that don't get as in depth as NOVA. PBS Space Time is one, PBS Eons is another. The PBS Eons is another - That Time Oxygen Almost Killed Everything https://youtu.be/qERdL8uHSgI

I liked PBS Infinite Series on math but it stopped after 65 episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@pbsinfiniteseries/videos

Reply on news.ycombinator.com