Geologic Timeline Individual Reflection

The first major event in Earth's history is its formation. The Earth formed around 4.6 billion years ago as a magma ball that was constantly being pummeled by meteors. Slowly, it cooled down and developed a carbon dioxide atmosphere that protected the surface from celestial objects. The formation is very significant because without it, there would be no place for life to develop in our solar system.
Another important event is the Great Oxygenation Event. The event occurred around 2.3 billion years ago because of the appearance of Cyanobacteria that converted carbon dioxide into oxygen. It is a vital event because it allowed aerobic organisms to evolve and all multicellular life depends on oxygen for survival.
A huge event in the history of our planet is the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution started about 200 years ago and created a shift from mostly manual, cottage-industry style companies to concentrated, urbanized factories that depended on fossil fuels for power. The event in part lead to our current global society and materialistic, unsustainable lives. If the industrial revolution didn't occur, we may not be as technologically advanced, but we also wouldn't be seeing spikes in CO2 levels, temperature fluctuations, extreme weather events, microplastics in our oceans, and colossal extinction rates.

The Earth's history stretches from 4.6 billion years ago to today. If we compressed the 13.8 billion years that the universe has existed into 365 days, all human history would take place in the last few seconds of the last day of December. Although I knew the geologic time scale very well before this, I had never come across this comparison. The comparison shows how small and insignificant we are as well as how many millions of years of evolution it has taken for us to develop.

In our short time on Earth, humans have caused extinctions, elevated CO2 levels, climate change, and plastic to become extremely common. I think that by devastating our environment, we are being unfair to both our ancestors and our descendants. We are being unfair to our ancestors by harming other species which we are actually quite closely related to and destroying the planet that they contributed so much energy to. Environmental issues are very detrimental to our descendants because they will have to live in a barren world and deal with the consequences of our materialism.