What Was The "Boring Billion" Really Like?
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Published 2021-10-17
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Researched and Written by Leila Battison
Narrated and Edited by David Kelly
Thumbnail Art and Art by Ettore Mazza
Art by Khail Kupsky
Maps by Adriano Bezerra
If you like our videos, check out Leila's Youtube channel:
/ @somethingincredible
Music from Epidemic Sound and Artlist, stock footage from Videoblocks.
References:
www.sciencenews.org/article/new-fascination-earths…
www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229672-900-why-di…
www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Archive/December-2…
cosmosmagazine.com/earth/earth-sciences/explainer-…
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11540130/
theconversation.com/earths-boring-billion-years-of…
www.pnas.org/content/108/8/3105
home.cern/science/experiments/cloud
www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11500
IMAGE CREDITS:
Oxford Museum By Alejandro Quintanar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78979717
Martin Brasier Hummingbird Films (Fair Use)
Oxford Museum By © Jorge Royan / www.royan.com.ar/, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15102669
Dinosaur eye By © Jorge Royan / www.royan.com.ar/, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15102669
Oxford Museum By Christian Michelides, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79657107
Australopithicus By Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann - Pressebilder Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, www.neanderthal.de/de/urmenschen.html, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94895238
Lycopod By Charlie Brenner from Jackson Mississippi, USA - Pearl River backwaterUploaded by Allstarecho, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6878978
Trilobite By Vassil - Alias Collections., CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3200496
Ediacaran By Smith609 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17603788
Ediacran By Ryan Somma - Life in the Ediacaran SeaUploaded by FunkMonk, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24277381
Oxford Museum By User:Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61828345
By Geni - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51797048
Sudbury Impact Formations By James St. John - Gneiss (Archean; Windy Lake Northwest roadcut, Sudbury Impact Structure, Ontario, Canada) 2, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84543723
Roger Buick (washington university, fair use)
Donald Canfield (fair use, PNAS)
Banded Iron Formations By Graeme Churchard from Bristol, UK - Dales GorgeUploaded by PDTillman, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30889569
By James St. John - Jaspilite banded iron formation (Soudan Iron-Formation, Neoarchean, ~2.69 Ga; Stuntz Bay Road outcrop, Soudan Underground State Park, Soudan, Minnesota, USA) 53, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41251871
By James St. John - Banded iron formation (Temagami Iron-Formation, Neoarchean, ~2.736 Ga; Temagami North roadcut, Temagami, Ontario, Canada) 15, CC BY 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82969686
Simon Poulton - The geochemical society (fair use)
Torridon Group By Mick Knapton at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7977960
By Anne Burgess, CC BY-SA 2.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=819238
Bicellium Brasieri By Authors of the study: Paul K. Strother, Martin D. Brasier, David Wacey, Leslie Timpe, Martin Saunders, Charles H. Wellman - www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(2…, CC BY 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105582202
Cambrian By CNX OpenStax - cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:4Wwybz2E@3/Introdu…, CC BY 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49931564
All Comments (21)
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anything pre-Twitter is awesome
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I can imagine the ultimate curse. Make someone Immortal then transport them back in time to 1.8 billion years ago.
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Makes me wonder if the boring billion was the great filter. Perhaps most planets don't stabilize long enough for complex eukayotic life to properly form.
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I love the way he describes the ocean a few times, especially when he says, "That ocean is a stagnant, putrid expanse rimmed with black sludge and emitting a sulphurous stench that spans the globe". So many great words in there.
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I had a philosophy professor who could make a single lecture feel like a boring billion.
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Shout-out to the cameraman who dedicated a billion years of his life to record this.
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Geology always sends me off on an existential panic because I remember how temporary the conditions for our survival are.
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Our concept of time is so tiny. It’s absolutely insane thinking about that many years
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when something has a billion to one chance of happening, you might want a billion years of stable conditions for it to happen in.
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Dang imagine hoping nobody will notice the stain on your shirt, then the freaking narrator puts you on blast in the opening 10 seconds
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When I started reading astronomy books, the age of the universe was given as 4.5 billion years. It is now 13.8 byo. I don't look too bad for a 9 billion year old man.
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This feels weirdly inspirational. Like no matter what you go through in life, when you somehow get to a deep end and feel like you cannot move on, nothing is happening in life and you feel stagnant, you will always do something that will lead to success in the future. It may take some time, but the end result would be a change into something better. There is always an end to bad events in life, even the Earth went through it.
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How boring could it have been if the whole atmosphere was laughing gas?
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And people wonder why we haven't found signs of advanced alien life yet. If the most Earthlike planet of all - Earth - could spend an entire billion years with a stinking sludge ocean and not much going on evolutionarily, it's hardly a stretch to think that so many other Earthlike planets simply stay this way, if they ever get that far at all.
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Surprisingly, the boring billion is more interesting than the exam I have in 2 hours.
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Still find myself watching this video over and over again. A billion years of a Black Sea and a stagnant earth? It’s beyond fascinating to me.
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Red algae, the first fungi, brown algae, green algae, and probably the first metazoans : the boring billions is not so boring, and the relationship between all those living creatures is still mysterious.
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Conodonts aren’t tooth-shaped, it’s just that their teeth are typically the only part of them that fossilise. They would’ve looked a bit like modern lampreys or hagfish.
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I cannot recommend this channel highly enough. The narration, subjects and pacing are almost perfect.
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The Boring Billion was unendurably dreadfully toxic and dull. It only ended when the Earth cooled, not as some inevitable turning point in the march of progress. Congratulations for making such an interesting video on the dullest of subjects. I use this to go to sleep with most nights. It's a bedtime story that gives me much to be grateful for.
