Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only place known in the universe where life has originated and found habitability.
Earth is estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years.
They have examined rocks from the moon and from meteorites, neither of which have been altered by the rock cycle. The same techniques of radiometric dating have been used on those rocks. All the data from Earth and beyond has led to the estimated age of 4.5 billion years for our planet.
The earliest life forms we know of were microscopic organisms (microbes) that left signals of their presence in rocks about 3.7 billion years old. The signals consisted of a type of carbon molecule that is produced by living things.
At that time our now-temperate planet was a hothouse world of dense jungle and Sahara-like desert overrun by dinosaurs. This period, the Cretaceous, has long fascinated scientist and layman alike.
At the cosmic origin, a trillion years ago, all that existed was an endless Light Ocean. Inexhaustible was this frozen supply of light available for black holes to continually build spheres and solar systems in galaxies.
The First Humans
One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.
Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".
The first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, probably when some apelike creatures in Africa began to walk habitually on two legs. They were flaking crude stone tools by 2.5 million years ago. Then some of them spread from Africa into Asia and Europe after two million years ago.
Microscopic grains of dead stars are the oldest known material on the planet — older than the moon, Earth and the solar system itself.
In 10,000 years, if we totally let it rip, the planet could ultimately be an astonishing 7 degrees Celsius warmer on average and feature seas 52 meters (170 feet) higher than they are now, the paper suggests.
The early Earth is loosely defined as Earth in its first one billion years, or gigayear (Ga, 109y). The “early Earth” encompasses approximately the first gigayear in the evolution of our planet, from its initial formation in the young Solar System at about 4.55 Ga to sometime in the Archean eon at about 3.5 Ga.
Overview. Homo sapiens, the first modern humans, evolved from their early hominid predecessors between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. They developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. The first modern humans began moving outside of Africa starting about 70,000-100,000 years ago.
While our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans only evolved about 200,000 years ago.
Scientists think that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Coincidentally, this is the same age as the rest of the planets in the Solar System, as well as the Sun. Of course, it's not a coincidence; the Sun and the planets all formed together from a diffuse cloud of hydrogen billions of years ago.
Putting all this together, between 9,800 and 9,700 years ago is an accurate date of creation for Adam and Eve. During this time, the Upper Paleolithic/Lower Mesolithic, humans created before Adam and Eve were yet hunter-gatherers.
According to the Bible (Genesis 2:7), this is how humanity began: "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." God then called the man Adam, and later created Eve from Adam's rib.
Adam's age at death is given as 930 years. According to the Book of Jubilees, Cain married his sister Awan, a daughter of Adam and Eve.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
The first humans to leave Africa 40,000 years ago are believed to have had dark skin, which would have been advantageous in sunny climates. But humans did not uniformly develop light skin when they reached the colder regions of Europe.
The Big Bang was the moment 13.8 billion years ago when the universe began as a tiny, dense, fireball that exploded. Most astronomers use the Big Bang theory to explain how the universe began.
In the next 1,000 years, the amount of languages spoken on the planet are set to seriously diminish, and all that extra heat and UV radiation could see darker skin become an evolutionary advantage. And we're all set to get a whole lot taller and thinner, if we want to survive, that is. Why?
22 billion years in the future is the earliest possible end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario, assuming a model of dark energy with w = −1.5. False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs field is metastable.
The universe will die. Eventually it will become nothing. In roughly a quadrillion years, a last star will give its last twinkle, and black holes will devour everything before they completely evaporate. And in a googol years (that's 10 to the hundredth power, which is a lot), the universe will be empty.