4.57 – 4.40 billion years ago
Birth of a Planet
Accretion, Theia, and the making of the Moon.
- Tent-pole
- The Theia impact
- Span
- 4.57 – 4.40 billion years ago
A chapter from this layer: “Theia — the day Earth had a twin, and ate it”
The dig plan
4.54 billion years, in twelve arcs
Time isn’t divided evenly — interest is. The Precambrian gets billions of years per arc; the last arc covers five million years and is already the busiest dig site on the board. Every layer below is an arc; its thickness is how many chapters are sited there so far.
88 chapters sited across the twelve arcs above — six of them (A1, A2, A4, A5, A6, A7) are fully mined or closed, and 6 are still being actively mined for more. When a chapter strikes something the audience loves, the dig bends and we go deeper right there, so this number grows; it is never padded to hit a round total.
The clock we tell time by
The Earth Calendar
Deep time is unfeelable, so every chapter stamps its date on a calendar that maps all 4.54 billion years onto a single year. Formation is January 1. Right now is midnight, December 31.
Jan 1
Earth forms
A cloud of dust collapses into a planet.
Feb 21
First life
Chemistry becomes biology in the early oceans.
Jun 21
The air turns to poison
The Great Oxidation Event rusts the oceans.
Nov 18
The Cambrian explosion
Eyes, armor, hunters — animals arrive.
Dec 26
The dinosaurs die
An asteroid ends a 175-million-year reign.
Dec 31, 11:59:37 PM
All recorded history
Everything ever written happens in the last 23 seconds.
Watch the dates as the series runs: early chapters crawl through January. The dinosaurs don’t die until the day after Christmas.