The Story of Earth | The Human Odyssey Series

Before there was anything, there was a cloud of dust. From that cosmic dust, a planet was born—our planet. But the Earth you know, a world of blue oceans and green continents, is a recent invention. In this episode of The Human Odyssey, we travel back to the very beginning to witness the 4.5-billion-year life story of our world. We’ll see its hellish birth, a molten sphere of rock under a sky of poison gas. We’ll witness the titanic collision that created our moon and the slow, patient arrival of water that would become our oceans. We’ll dive into a strange, alien sea to find the first spark of life and see how these tiny organisms waged a two-billion-year war that terraformed the entire globe. We’ll shiver through the greatest ice age in history, when Earth became a frozen snowball drifting through space, and we’ll feel the ground shake as supercontinents crash together and tear themselves apart. This is a story of impossible survival, of catastrophic destruction and incredible creation. It’s the biography of our home, a tale of fire, ice, and life’s relentless will to exist.

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