Two-and-a-half
billion years ago, the earth was a very different place, but it already
had life. Not anything you’d recognize, or could even
see, but
life of a sort anyway. While those archaic single-cell life forms
reproduced by splitting, they also managed to mutate like crazy, at
least on an evolutionary scale. And some of them caused a mass
extinction event.
It’s
kind of strange to think that oxygen could have ever been considered a
pollutant in the air. But it was, and that affected everything that came
after. You have to wonder what kind of life forms will evolve in the
greenhouse gas-rich atmosphere that will remain after we become extinct
after the climate change apocalypse.
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