4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour

November 10, 2023 1:23 PM

The latest video (YT) from Kurzgesagt, "We’ve scaled the complete timeline of our Earth’s life into our first animated movie! Every second shows about a million years of the planet’s evolution. Hop on a musical train ride and experience how long a billion years really is." Animation and music with occasional narration.

Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

posted by indexy (30 comments total)

I love this
posted by Going To Maine at 2:04 PM on November 10, 2023

starts the vid, goes for a walk to buy some groceries, arrives back home to find we're still just in the Rhyacian -- 2.27 billion years ago. Time sure takes its time.
posted by philip-random at 2:05 PM on November 10, 2023

I have only gotten a little way in, but I enjoyed “the atmosphere is mostly CO2, and the floor… is lava.
posted by notoriety public at 2:15 PM on November 10, 2023 [9 favorites]

When they said it was musical, I was trepidatious to find out what it would be like to have Steve Taylor singing...

Spoiler: no singing, just some electronica in the background.
posted by polecat at 2:27 PM on November 10, 2023

I'm not sure what the genre is but it's probably earthcore.
posted by phooky at 2:51 PM on November 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm not sure what the genre is but it's probably earthcore.

if you watch the video you'll learn the earth's core is billions of years younger than the earth itself
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:57 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm here for this
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:58 PM on November 10, 2023

The jokes keep coming to mind and then dissolving in the goodness of this thing. It's really wonderful.
posted by mittens at 3:29 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I get that they are emphasizing that nothing happens for a long time, but they could really have animated many of things they talked about. Such as all of the microbes, plants going on shore, and history's largest asteroid strike.
posted by Prof. Danger at 3:37 PM on November 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

blink at the wrong times and you'll miss all the cool stuff
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:40 PM on November 10, 2023

Well I watched the whole thing and I liked it but there were some teasers where they mentioned events but then don't explain them. Impact events, sex...at least they showed Chixulub!
posted by supermedusa at 3:55 PM on November 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

This was the perfect thing to have on while making dinner, thanks! I do wonder, though, if we would break up those earlier eras more finely if we had more information about what was going on.
posted by mollweide at 4:00 PM on November 10, 2023

Also, I don't feel so bad about my own life when I realize it took life, and Earth itself for that matter, so much time to get its shit together.
posted by mollweide at 4:01 PM on November 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Related, and a bit shorter: bill wurtz's history of the entire world, i guess.
posted by JHarris at 4:15 PM on November 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

I do wonder, though, if we would break up those earlier eras more finely if we had more information about what was going on.

You mean like how the evolution of The Simpsons into brilliance then out of it and now having a renaissance makes more sense if you track the writers room evolution across time?
posted by hippybear at 4:20 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

The Boring Billion [Wikipedia]
The Boring Billion, a slingshot for Complex Life on Earth [nature.com]
"The period 1800 to 800 Ma (“Boring Billion”) is believed to mark a delay in the evolution of complex life, primarily due to low levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. "
posted by indexy at 4:34 PM on November 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

@37 minutes: 1.8 Billion Years Ago in the Statherian ... a natural, self sustaining nuclear reactor awakes, just from scattered uranium deposits in the ground.

Wait, what?? Well I'll be damned. How had I never heard of this before??
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:39 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, I wanted to see the moon slowly cool and drift away. The side-scrolling choice of animation has its limitations.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:41 PM on November 10, 2023

You mean like how the evolution of The Simpsons into brilliance then out of it and now having a renaissance makes more sense if you track the writers room evolution across time?

Yes! Except it would probably involve isotopes in some way.
posted by mollweide at 4:41 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh, wait.
posted by mollweide at 4:46 PM on November 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

How had I never heard of this before??

It's even been on the blue.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:12 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

That was before I'd joined. I should've perused the back-issues... Seriously though, I'm still surprised I'd never encountered the topic elsewhere.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:20 PM on November 10, 2023

Also, I wanted to see the moon slowly cool and drift away.

I mean, I've met you, we've hung out.. I'd assumed you'd witnessed all this firsthand.
posted by hippybear at 8:37 PM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ooo, this holds hands with the well produced Deep Time Walk app. Put on your ear buds, go for a (long) walk (or two or…), listen. Every meter is a million years….
posted by mrettig at 4:01 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, I don't feel so bad about my own life when I realize it took life, and Earth itself for that matter, so much time to get its shit together.

Not to mention all the time it took the solar system for form the planet with the size and composition it had and the galaxy to form the right kinds of stars and reactions that would produce the solar system that would become that solar system and the universe taking the time to first become capable of even forming elements and then stars and galaxies and then our galaxy (which has absorbed/is absorbing) several other galaxies along the way and who knows how vital all of that might of been!).

The really crazy thing is that it almost certainly wasn't the first time a planet like this has formed and spawned life. Maybe someday there will be a good excuse to do a post about something new related to Fermi's paradox. My preferred hypothesis is that we are definitely NOT average, there definitely are other intelligent life forms, it's just that we're on the early end. The universe will be teeming with life, it'll just take....a while. The theorized life-span of the universe is so long that, to me, it kind of fits that it takes a while for intelligent life to emerge in abundance.

Still, odds are that any time you're looking back into the milky way or looking at another galaxy, you are looking at aliens. I hope one of them is looking back, even if we'll never be able to see each other.
posted by VTX at 8:24 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't know who actually did the music for this, but it really reminds me of zombi.

It's cool that Kurzgesagt is on top of these sorts of trends. My kid (who loves this channel) has been watching "timeline of the universe" videos on much lower production value channels for a while. Something nice and hypnotic about a number going up so high.
posted by jonbro at 9:32 AM on November 11, 2023

I’m not previously familiar with them, but Epic Mountain did the music and the video info contains a link to their bandcamp. I bought this soundtrack because i enjoyed it a lot. More than the video, tbh, which had some good parts but keeping things interesting is in conflict with their goal of conveying just how staggeringly long it took for stuff to happen. The fact that I liked the music is the only way I was able to get through the thing.
posted by aubilenon at 9:59 AM on November 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is great!

I used to love reading books on paleontology addressed to children when I was a kid myself in the eighties. At the time, most such books begun with the Cambrian period, and before that there was a mostly empty expanse of time between „origin of the earth“ and „multicellular life“.

I rediscovered my taste for paleontology during the pandemic, and found, to my delight, that there has been a great deal of research filling out that blank expanse of time between 4.5 billion years and 600 million years ago. With fascinating eras like the boring billion mentioned above by indexy, the planet-wide glaciations during the Huronian or Cryogenian periods, the Great Oxygenation Event, the Francevillian or Ediacaran biota…

I would recommend the PBS Eons videos, since they cover many of these topics in short videos of around ten minutes.
There’s another channel that was recommended to me by the Youtube algorithm recently, History of the Earth, about many of the same topics. I would like to offer this video, as companion to the Kurzgesagt one: „How far back in Earth’s history could you have survived?“.

Spoiler alert: starting 4.5 billion years in the past, the first time at which a human being may have found a liveable temperature, enough oxygen, food and shelter is around 100 million years in the past. The other 4.4 billion years would have been quite inhospitable to us...
posted by LaVidaEsUnCarnaval at 12:26 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I do rather like to imagine the band sitting down together in the studio, heaving a big sigh, counting in, and playing this entire hour in one take.
posted by hippybear at 2:23 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

fun reminder that Kurzgesagt is funded by the Gates Foundation and has released videos promoting green tech that would benefit Gates Foundation holdings (and generally promoted other forms of greenwashing)

as always, happy fun lil sciencey videos should be taken with a grain of salt for any/all ideologies promoted within
posted by paimapi at 4:15 PM on November 12, 2023