Birth of Earth

Around 4.6 billion years ago, our universe was born by accretion from the solar nebula known as the Big Bang. As the sun heated up, this orbiting matter accumulated and unavoidable mass of larger bodies collide to successively create protoplanets with its own gravitational pull. During this period, Earth was nothing but molten rock from the collision with other bodies and volcanoes, temperature reaching over 2,000 fahrenheit. Not only that, but Earth then, would’ve been toxic to humans and modern life because of the lack of oxygen. Only carbon dioxide and nitrogen were presented and some water vapor. One massive planetary collision has thought to be the reason behind Earth’s tilt and the formation of the moon. As more and more meteors and other bodies continuously impact with the Earth’s surface, the Earth’s gravitational pull became stronger, giving the moon the ability to orbit the Earth.
After 1 billion years of volcanic and other meteor activities, Earth finally was able to cool down and some form of life erupted. Before there was any sort of life, there was oxygen, before there was oxygen, there was water and till this day, theres no clarification on how Earth is the only planet in the universe, rich with water.There are several remarkable theories on how water came to existence billions of years ago. One is that from the gas from volcanic activities, the Earth rain for years and years, supplying it’s surface with 75% of water. Another theory is that water originated from the universe. H2O can not exist in outer space, but H and O can, separately. Hydrogen is the basic building material in the created in the Big Bang when our universe was newly formed. Oxygen exist in the process of star fusion, where stars get their energy from like the sun. If you combine H and O, you have H2O, water, which means there are enormous amount of water in space, but the only problem is, theres more hydrogen than there’s oxygen. For example, the sun only has 0.8% oxygen, the rest are mostly hydrogen and helium.
The Earth was a suffocated place 2.5 billion years ago until oxygen level rose up. As mentioned in the previous text, Earth has been filled with water from who knows where, but it still lacks oxygen, the key to every living thing. Oxygen is also one of the greatest mysteries when it comes to its origin. It has been thought that oxygen was created from cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria are single cell organisms, they are just a DNA that lives under water. Cyanobacteria are also the first life form that appeared on Earth, 3.5 billion years ago. These newborn single cell obtain their energy through a process called photosynthesis, where the sun is the main source of energy. Through photosynthesis, these living things, like today’s plants, it has the ability to produces oxygen and glucose, the key factor of the future generation species that would soon roam the Earth.
As oxygen fills up the Earth’s atmosphere, many life forms appear. Despite bacteria being the first known life forms on Earth, scientists have discovered that sponges are also considered the earliest living thing on Earth. In 2012, the oldest evidence of a sea sponge found was a fossil discovered in a 760-million-year-old rock. This beat the previous record for oldest sea-sponge fossil, a 635-million-year-old sponge discovered in 2009. There may be still older fossils yet to find, but finding an older species is unlikely, as these simple organisms appear to be the progenitors of much more complicated life, including the first multicellular animals. First multicellular organisms arise from a single cell bacteria that generates multi-celled organisms, like plants, fungi, animals, and algae. Although there are many organisms, there is no clarification on how these cells came to be as animals, only theories.
Roughly 600 million years ago, life evolves in the sea, plants and sea creatures dominated the Earth. Yet, for most of the Earth’s existence, the only form of life has been single-celled organisms, such as bacterias. After some of these evolved the ability to photosynthesise, they slowly transformed the Earth’s atmosphere over billions of years by producing oxygen; an atmosphere with higher levels of oxygen which set the stage for a revolutionary change to life, the development of bodies made of many cells. The earliest fossils of these multi-celled animals are preserved in rocks that are around 575 million years old. These animals had no hard shells or skeletons, and the impressions left by their soft bodies are difficult to interpret. There are numerous scientific debate concerning what kinds of organisms they were, but most of them were probably not the ancestors of any animals living today. This period was known as the Ediacaran period, and during this time, the world looked much different from today. There was a single giant continent surrounded by an enormous sea. Areas of what would become Australia were part of this continent and were in the northern hemisphere near the equator. The eastern coast of this ancient continent ran through what is now South Australia.
Until plants evolved, the landscape was barren. Without plants to stabilise the soil, the Earth was bare and scoured by erosion. A green fringe on the water’s edge began a slow transformation; a small number of plants developed a revolutionary adaptation or vascularity, the ability to transport water and nutrients through a network of specialised tissue. These early vascular plants were the first to grow on land, and Baragwanathia, from Victoria, was one of the first leaf-bearing plants known. Land plants, although very low-growing, provided shade, shelter and food, inviting invertebrates to follow into a new world of opportunity. As these plants spread across the Earth’s landscape, other species depend on it, opening doors for a greater revolutionary of living things.
During the Permian, the landmasses merged, forming a ‘supercontinent’ called Pangea. The remainder of the Earth’s surface comprised a single ocean. Polar ice caps covered the southern (Gondwanan) part of Pangea, while desert areas covered the northern inland part of the continent. Land animals such as amphibious tetrapods and reptiles lived in the zones where plant life thrived. The oceans teemed with fish and invertebrates until the end of the Permian, when the biggest natural disaster in history killed 90 percent of the planet’s species. The cause is not yet known – perhaps an asteroid impact, stagnant oceans, massive volcanic eruptions, a significant fall in sea levels, or a combination of these. Many marine groups became extinct including tabulate and rugose corals, eurypterids and the trilobites. The ‘great dying’ also had an impact on life on land. The extinction of many plants reduced the food supply for large plant-eating reptiles and removed habitat for insects. The ancestors of mammals, dinosaurs and the reptiles we see today survived in small numbers.
250 million years ago, the Triassic period began, when the first dinosaur are thought to appear. The severity of the extinction at the end of the Permian meant that recovery was slow. The surviving marine life struggled to recover from the lingering effects of the mass extinction, such as significantly lower oxygen levels. The extinction of many corals left an empty niche, which was only filled by the evolution of modern scleractinian corals later in the Triassic. It took coral reefs millions of years to reform. Survivors on land included insects, plants, amphibious tetrapods and some reptile groups – among them the ancestors of mammals, dinosaurs and birds. There are few sedimentary rocks in Victoria dating from this period, so our knowledge is limited about the animals and plants that existed then. We do know that the world had no polar ice caps. Victoria had a mild climate despite being near the south pole. We can imagine the valleys, previously carved by glaciers, were now green with conifer forests and an full of ferns. They were probably home to amphibious tetrapods, reptiles and the earliest dinosaurs and mammals.
Next, the Jurassic period, where birds and mammals evolved in the shadow of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs thrived in a world that was generally warm and had large areas of forest. The first mammals evolved beneath the shadow of the dinosaurs, and one group of dinosaurs gave rise to the first birds. The diverse ocean life included many species of fishes, marine reptiles and invertebrates. Dinosaurs large and small were dominant on land across the globe. Marine reptiles such as long-necked plesiosaurs hunted in the sea, and large cephalopod molluscs called ammonites caught prey with their tentacles. The movement of the Earth’s crust gradually began to break up Gondwana, and Australia started to pull away from Antarctica. As the rest of the continent began to break apart, many life forms evolved the world in parts that are inhabitable, causing them to extinct.
At the start of the Cretaceous, the world was warm and free of polar ice caps. The largest animals were reptiles – dinosaurs, flying pterosaurs, dolphin-like ichthyosaurs and giant sea turtles. Mammals remained small. Flowering plants evolved and spread across the world. All this changed 65.5 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous when a major catastrophe led to the extinction of dinosaurs, many marine reptiles, all flying reptiles (pterosaurs) and many marine invertebrates. There is strong evidence that the culprit was a huge asteroid that formed a large crater on what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Vast clouds of dust produced by the impact would have blocked out sunlight across much of the Earth, killing plants and affecting the food chain for almost all animals. Smaller animals and those that could feed on detritus would have been able to survive. Despite a warmer world, Victoria was still close to the south pole and it was one of the coolest places on the planet at the time. Victoria and Antarctica were covered in temperate forests of conifers and ferns. Many dinosaurs, some only the size of a chicken, adapted to life in these cooler forests, as did other reptiles, mammals and birds. Following the extinction of the dinosaurs, the surviving birds, mammals and reptiles diversified. Drifting continents continued to change the face of the planet, building mountains, creating new ocean currents and causing major climate changes. The extinction of the giant marine reptiles left the niche of large ocean predators vacant. In the warm oceans, early whales evolved from hoofed, deer-like land mammals that lived in shallow water. When Australia and South America separated from Antarctica, cool water began circulating around the pole. Plankton thrived there and plankton-feeding baleen whales evolved.
The Quaternary period is most recent of any period, marking from 2.5 million years till the present day. At the start of the Quaternary, the continents were just about where they are today, slowing inching here and there as the forces of plate tectonics push and tug them about. But throughout the period, the planet has wobbled on its path around the sun. The slight shifts cause ice ages to come and go. By 800,000 years ago, a cyclical pattern had emerged: Ice ages last about 100,000 years followed by warmer interglacials of 10,000 to 15,000 years each. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. Sea levels rose rapidly, and the continents achieved their present-day outline. Quaternary is often considered the "Age of Humans." Homo erectus appeared in Africa at the start of the period, and as time marched on the hominid line evolved bigger brains and higher intelligence. The first modern humans evolved in Africa about 190,000 years ago and dispersed to Europe and Asia and then on to Australia and the Americas. Along the way the species has altered the composition of life in the seas, on land, and in the air—and now, scientists believe, we're causing the planet to warm.
When it comes to how we, humans came to be, there is no true evidence that can prove of our existence on the face of this planet other than theories and religions. One of the most common known theory of our existence is the Charles Darwin’s Theory, the Evolution. Darwin's Theory of Evolution is the widely held notion that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor: the birds and the bananas, the fishes and the flowers, all related. Based on this theory, us, humans, originated from a different species. Man believe in this theory, which are known as atheists, although not all atheist believes in this theory either. So where do we really come from? The Evolution Theory states that we were once chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives and we compare ourselves to them, surprisingly over 90% of our DNA are identical. This figure may still sound impressive, but most DNA is used for basic cellular functions which all living things share. For example, we have about half the same DNA as a banana, and yet people do not use this to emphasize how similar bananas are to us! So 95% does not say as much as it first appears to. Darwin believes that through a long period of times, over thousands of millions years later, what once was a chimp, alters as humans. This theory attracts many attention because 200 thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens/first humans appear to be half chimp and half humans, but after thousands of years, they became what we are today.
On the other hand, there are religions. In the Holy Bible, it clearly states that God created the Heaven and the Earth but countless disagree. They say that all religions are the same, base on one assumption, the fact that god created human beings, but we need to analyze further in depth to comprehend this whole scientific theory of how life was form. To do so, further examination of the Bible is required. Most Christians accepts the millions and billions of years, and always thought that the Bible must have a big gap of time scale in between every verse or chapters, for over 200 years. There are a number of reasons why we shouldn’t accept this, first of all, the evidence in Genesis one is literal. God defined the days of the creations, he used numbers, second day, third day, etc. Also, we can examine further more if we take a look at Exodus 20:11, God gave the commandment to the Israelites to work 6 days and rest on the 7th because he created the Heaven, the Earth, the sea and all living things in them in 6 days. This means that there can’t be any creation before the 6 days, God created all things in 6 days! Another example would be the Noah flood. Noah’s flood washes away those millions and billions of years ideas which came from the geological record, but it came as a result of a geologist in the 19th century. Rejecting the Biblical account of the Noah’s flood, using the theories of scientists assumptions to interpret the rocks and fossils. Noah’s flood was a global catastrophe, so it would’ve produce exactly the kind of geological record we see today of thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks, burying the fossils underneath them.
Lastly, Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years. Radiometric dating was not developed until the early twentieth century, by which time virtually the whole world had already accepted the millions of years. In recent years creationists in the RATE project have done experimental, theoretical, and field research to uncover more such evidence, diamonds and coal, which the evolutionists say are millions of years old, were dated by carbon-14 to be only thousands of years old. It was also to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years to thousands of years, confirming the Bible. In Mark 10:6, Jesus says “from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female”. He didn’t say after the creation or billions of years after the creation as the Revolution Theory would want us to believe, he says, from the beginning of the creation, Adam and Eve was right there and then. Today, many theories or assumptions have inspired many people in believing that God does not exist, by portraying them on the screen of a television or a computer. All we have to know is that science can sure teach us what's out there, up in the sky, where we came from, how we came to be what we are, and it sure can make us betray ourselves and beliefs. In a few hundred years, science has taken us further in understanding the universe than the religion has in 10,000. But one thing is that science cannot define what's inside every one of us, our hearts desires and emotions, only religions can do that, believing in something is better than not believing in anything at all, theres always a purpose for everything, our lives aren’t given for nothing.