What If We Traveled One Billion Years Into the Past?

If you could see all of human history in a single glance, what would you see?

What would you see if you traveled one billion years into the past? Did earth ever look like a giant slush ball? How far back would you have to go to see the first humans? And are we already going extinct? That is where we are in cosmic terms, from the first steps out of the slime to the first steps on the moon, but in that short amount of time we've done quite a bit.

Traveling through the jumbled mess of time will allow you to see the effects and then the causes of the most powerful forces that shaped our world. However, if you want to travel backward in time, you'll need to move faster than the speed of light, according to Einstein. Alternatively, your time machine might jump through wormholes, a theoretical tunnel that connects two different points in space and time.

The sixth mass extinction event, known as the holocene extinction, is currently taking place. Human activity is to blame for this period of time being one of the most destructive in history. As humans destroy coral reefs and rain forests, the numerous animals and plants that depend on these ecosystems perish along with them. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, 67 of endangered species could go extinct. If you travel back to the 18th and 19th centuries, you can observe how the industrial revolution's pollution was reversed.

Tour the planet 200 000 years ago and you would witness the arrival of our species, the homo sapiens jump back seven million years to northern Chad, and the oldest known species of humans could stroll right by. However, if you want to retrace our first steps, you'll need to go back farther.

The skills these early humans learned to survive and you'd need them quickly, but if you sign up with the great courses plus you can make this year whatever that is by learning with a purpose with top experts in their fields taking deep dives into a wide range of subjects there's something for everyone if you're spending time with our primitive ancestors you might want to take the outdoor fundamentals course covering everything from preparation to navigation or maybe i'd like to take the outdoor fundamentals course covering everything from preparation to

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The great courses plus dot com slash offer a 14-day trial with unlimited access, but what if you don't get the chance to travel back in time to take advantage of this offer? If you don't prepare, you might not survive the Jurassic period, but if you go back 60 million years, you'll see the first primates emerge from the humid rainforests of Asia. If you go back 65 million years, you'll be under the giant asteroid that caused a global The impact also sparked widespread, powerful volcanic eruptions, which resulted in the last of the sun's rays going out and the area flooded.

Go back 130 million years and you'll see the first flowers bloom. Travel 200 million years back in time and you'll see the breakup of Pangaea, the mass of land that will become the continents. As the land breaks apart, massive lava eruptions will kill almost 80 percent of the species on earth. Now go back another 20 million years and you'll see the firs trees. If not for the dinosaurs dying out, mammals like us might not have taken over the planet.

Nonetheless, the planet must experience what would be referred to as the great dying, also known as the Permian extinction. You could walk from Argentina to China now, but things get interesting around 375 million years ago when you would watch marine animals walking onto land for the first time. You might see a strange creature called a titalic which looks like a salamander mixed with a fish. This strange creature would later evolve into mammals and amphibians but just like every species you saw before occurs when ice sheets from the polar caps extend into the oceans. Almost 70% of all marine life perished during this global freeze more than 460 million years ago. If you look back further, you can observe how life began underwater during the Cambrian explosion. Scientists are still unsure of how this extraordinary event occurred between 635 and 850 million years ago when the earth twice froze over, once for nearly 60 million years and then again for 15 million years. One theory contends that the earth was only covered in a thin film of ice, allowing the sun's rays to seep through and plant the seeds of life.

Plant the seeds of life below, but look back one billion years in time. You'll be startled to discover that, at this time, red algae are spore-forming to reproduce, cells are combining to form larger species, and not much else.

Nothing has harmed our planet more cruelly in such a short period of time than humans, but perhaps they will eventually make things right. Our planet or our hearts could undergo a change that would put our future on a different course, or perhaps, like the dinosaurs and neanderthals, we would simply be replaced by something else. Let's use our time machine to find out what would happen if you traveled back in time.