Life
There are many rare things in our Universe: warmth, light, colour and gold. But rarest of all, is life.Â
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There has been life on our planet for 4 billion years. You know about some of it – lions, elephants and the big famous animals. But there are so many other other weird and wonderful creatures on our planet. Let’s dive in.
The famous “Blue Marble” image, one of the first images of the entire Earth which was taken by the Apollo 17 crew as they headed towards the Moon on December 7, 1972. Further details here.
The story of life on our planet...
Our Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. Our Earth only arrived 4 billion years ago, about two-thirds of the way in. Our planet started out as a molten rock of lava and sulphuric hellfire. Once it cooled down a bit, the first basic organisms evolved. Even then, it wasn’t until much later that any life forms most people would recognize took shape.
Suddenly, 500 million years ago, some very exciting things started to happen. A huge number of different types of fish and crustaceans began to appear. Then we got the first land animals and reptiles. Then along came the dinosaurs and mammals. Shortly after these, the birds arrived. And in the single eye-blink before the present, in an almost insignificant amount of time, we came along.
In terms of both space and time, life is incredibly rare and impossibly special. Most of our Universe, is cold, rocky, and dark. There is only one tiny corner where anything moves or breaths. And for most of the time our Universe has been around, even that tiny corner has been mostly quiet. It has only been in the most recent moments, at the very end of our timeline, that anything in that corner has started to sing.
An image of green algae blooming in the baltic ocean taken from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission by the European Space Agency. It is so stunning. Further details here.
Life on earth: A timeline
An incredible image of the internal workings of a cell by E Ingersoll and G McGill. Cells are incredible pieces of biological machinery with extraordinary complexity and beauty. Further details here.
SO who Do we share the planet with?
Life exists across our entire planet – oceans, rain forests, grasslands, jungles, cities, your gut, deep sea ocean trenches and nuclear reactors. It’s time to meet our co-pilots on spaceship earth.Â
What are the biggest living things?
Animals, plants, fungai, bacteria, viruses? How are they different?
So, is the whole earth alive?
An image of blue jellyfish taken off the coast of the United Kingdom in early summer. Further details here.
More on earth's life
