60-minute animated video puts 4.5 billions years of Earth's history in a nutshell

When we think about the Earth's history, most of us can go back only up to the times when dinosaurs roamed the planet. However, that's not even close to the beginning. The YouTube channel, Kurzgesadt (the German word for "In a nutshell"), dedicated to sharing animated videos explaining scientific phenomena takes us on a 60-minute musical train ride through the 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, per My Modern Met. The channel ardently steers towards its objective of "optimistic nihilism" and this experimental video was the brainchild of the team's passion towards the objective. Working on this video since 2019, the channel posted it last month on Kurzgesadt's 10th anniversary and it immediately garnered a large number of views, eventually crossing 7M.

The vibrant depiction of various eons along with a coherent narration of the crucial facts makes the video easy-to-understand to everyone. Each second of the 1-hour video represented 1.5 million years and dinosaurs showed up only during the 58th minute. This video is a huge "reality check" that we humans who spawned only 12000 years ago are extremely new compared to the billions of years of Earth's evolution. "4.5 years ago right after it was born the Earth was a hell of a lava," said the narrator and added that Earth collided with a Mars-sized object called Theia giving birth to the moon which remained huge in the night sky and shrunk after hundreds of millions of years. During its first eon Hadeon, the earth was nothing but a ball of flaming lava.

The Eoarchean was the beginning of life on Earth where living cells were spreading over the planet as the atmosphere cooled down and it rained for several million years. Around 3.5 billion years ago every continent was below water and during the Mesoarchean era, tectonic plates gave rise to the continents that we have today. The video showed how a monumental event called "The Great Oxidation" changed the planet forever as the oxygen from the widespread cyanobacteria filled the atmosphere and complex life cells formed. After the "Ice Age" occupied millions of years, several cosmic marvels molded the earth to become adaptive to much-evolved life forms.

What surprises us is that the Earth's core formed only 1.4 billion years ago well after life entered the Earth and the planet underwent millions of years of warming and cooling. But throughout all these unfavorable conditions, life still survived on the planet. As the supercontinent Gondwana formed, an explosion of life took place and a variety of microorganisms spread across the Earth. Plants began growing just 400 million years ago creating lush forests everywhere and the Jurassic era was dominated by the ancestors of birds - the dinosaurs. Just when Earth was thriving with life, a meteor collided destroying dinosaurs and many other species. When the narration said, "We're almost home," it meant nearly 40 million years ago and the flora and fauna that we know now were just booming.

It was funny how humans just appeared barely for a second at the end of the video. This teaches us an important lesson that in this gigantic world that has been evolving for billions of years, we are just a minuscule part. From the perspective of "optimistic nihilism" our life's problems are so microscopic compared to this boundless Universe. People were awestruck by the incredible history and @PJBgamer commented, "'Don't blink or you might miss all of human history.' That line feels so powerful. It really puts things into perspective." @eduardoneto1713 wrote, "I'm a geology student and I couldn't be prouder of this video. Such an amazing experience to watch our Earth's long and special history!"