TIME TRAVEL: Destination Precambrian
Let's start with the origin of existence on Earth. There are many theories about how all this came about. Once upon a time, a popular theory of how we got here was the Big Bang Theory, which says that there was an event, the bang, and everything happened after that event. One thing lead to another and here we are. Another popular belief is that there is a design. I am willing to consider a blend, a designer set it off and one thing lead to another and here we are. Long ago people had wars about their beliefs. Maybe they all are or were wrong and something else could be unfolding. Luckily, this little story is entirely about some music written and performed by Sverre Knut Johansen with Robert Rich.
An eon or era or epoch is a period of time that ends when there is a major change leading to a new era or epoch. An eon or era or epoch usually lasts millions of years. The quantity of time is less important than the major change, for example when meteors rained down leaving clouds of dust, or volcanoes erupted and caused lots of smoke which blocked out the sun and things became frozen. Perhaps a new period of time began after the majority of all life perished in the cold. Time went by. Slowly everything thawed out and the dust settled and there was eventually an abundance and life once again flourished in various forms. And then the next time maybe there was a change in the oxygen, so life almost all died out again. Sometimes the land would shift and huge continents would drop into the ocean or rise from the ocean. These things have always happened. There are lots of possibilities for explaining how we got here, and it can be hard to prove any of it. So let us listen to the music and enjoy simply considering the possibilities.
An hour is a long time. There are many hours in a day, and many days make up a year. A year is a long time. It has been estimated that on the Earth, so many millions of years ago, on this same place where we are standing (if you are reading this on Earth) dinosaurs were everywhere, and they left their bones to prove it. Can you imagine the first discovery of those bones -- stone skeletons of gigantic monsters! The dinosaurs once had it all, and ruled the earth for many thousands of years. Then one day everything changed.
Hours become days, years go by.
Before the dinosaurs, for millions of years everything was in the ocean, and before that was the Hadean time. The music begins during the Hadean Eon.
HADEAN EON
Hot rocks and lava are everywhere. Maybe there was no water, just dust in the wind, and lumps of fire, and bubbling rocks. There were some pretty big lumps and the smaller lumps came to see what was going on. One new lump started cooling off, and on the surface changes kept happening. There is a mild rumbling and tumbling in space, some spooky synthesizers, echo, swirling in blackness. In the story this is before there was life. The sound is dry. The sound is calm and expansive, poetic in nature, but orderly. Certainly not chaotic as one might imagine these primal times to sound with terrible storms and exploding volcanoes. It grooves.
ARCHEAN EON
Archean means "beginning" or "origin." There came to be water vapor on the now cooler lump. Eventually that water vapor changed and it started to rain, and it rained a long time, forming the oceans. So now on the Earth there were rocks and there was the ocean, and the wind.
After a long time there might have been some bits of blue-green scum growing in the water, which was like a little playground and maybe there were all kinds of little happy dots who gathered and tried new things. Some of these dots might have became Anaerobic Microbes, which could eventually lead to Aerobic Microbes. At first they had no oxygen, then as time went by, there was oxygen and that changed things in a big way.
Photosynthesis flourished, somehow using light with water and converting the primeval gases into oxygen. That probably took a long time, but eventually there was plenty of oxygen. And carbon dioxide. And water.
Maybe it started getting cold, and some of the water froze and there was snow. Sometimes there would be water, the music introduces trickling and bubbling sounds and quiet synthesizer horns, the opening develops into a funky pulse. There is not yet much life on the planet, but the music sounds to me like electronic frogs who boogie have arrived. I have no real proof of this.
PROTEROZOIC EON
Some of the little one celled critters got together and formed something new, later to be called Eukaryotes. So there might have been dots and scum, and these new Eukaryotes to eat them. Everyone might have started to make specialized new features, eventually forming organs and life systems. They would try something and if it worked, they stayed around and ate some more, if it did not work they went away.
How about some names? I love the old names, made up long after these times had ended. There was the ocean, and there were rocks. Later it was decided to name the biggest bunch of rocks Vaalbara. One day Vaalbara broke up and became several piles of rocks in the ocean, later named the supercontinents Kenorland, Nuna, and Rodina. After a really long time Pannotia emerged when Rodina turned itself inside out due to changes in the depth of the Earth.. The ocean was the best place to live but somehow new creatures figured out how to survive out of the water.
Imagine wind that sounds like whistles and synthesizers, developing into a beat that could be like a heart beat, and it just keeps going. Swirling in space, things change and the beat sustains. Hear subtle water drips at first, and soon a hand drum sounds in the swirling synthesizer universe. Some strings emerge. Sometimes I think I hear whales calling.
The eon ends with trickling water as single cells boogie and create oxygen from sunshine and after thousands of years enough oxygen to bring new life forms, there are thunderstorms and winds, not much else. Then there was more life. The synthesized strings give the music a classical glow as the earliest forms of life emerge, skittering and twithering, small creatures calling to each other. They are calling across time to our present now. This might only be possible through music.
PALEOZOIC ERA
Paleozoic means "ancient life."
Behold the Cambrian Explosion. The critters in the water were really working hard, and there were all kinds of new models, one of the first things they developed was a central system to coordinate the way the new parts worked together. This was the early chordate model, and there would have been critters with simple versions of what became backbones, but backbones as we know them were yet a long way off. They kept having problems with being soft and started working on making a hard shell, also feet and jointed knees and elbows, and those might have been called Arthropods, which became bugs and seafood. This caught on and eventually on the ocean floor there were trilobites skuttering around and prospering. This went on for a really long time and became the Ordovican period.
Ordovican is the word for a tribe of humans who lived many many years much time later in what is now North Wales in the British Isles. The Ordovican tribe had nothing to do with trilobites but it was a name that stuck when they were first making up names for this period of time. Who are they? Maybe "they" in this case were the people who wrote some of those old books. Besides the trilobites on the bottom of the sea there were lots of new things swimming around and learning to move around in the water. They worked on those early spinal cords some more.
Lots of time went by, new creatures came about, some did well and prospered, some did not.
Next came the Silurian period. Silurian is another word from yet another tribe who lived many many years later in the British Isles and they had nothing to do with spinal cords. Rocks and fossils are everywhere on the Earth, but they who wrote about it first got to make up the words. In Silurian times the swimming creatures developed into fish, but mostly they had no jaws yet, just hungry holes. Coral reefs were developing on the bottom of the sea, and the really big new thing going on was crawling out of the water to live on the rocks. Some of these critters became plants. It took a long time. There were also some animals, still working on developing their backbones.
Time for a new phase, the Devonian period, and you can probably guess by now that the name comes from what is now the city of Devon, in the British Isles, where now many people still walk on two feet. The animals were getting along with their spinal cord development, and the new model was called vertebrates. The most popular was the style known as tetrapods, which means "four feet" and those creatures eventually became lizards. Some were a few centimeters long and some were around five meters long. They still enjoyed spending lots of time in the water, but they were breathing air. The plants figured out how to become ferns and then developed into something that later became trees. The new land dwelling plants were working together to become forests and the bugs were developing all kinds of new creatures that eventually became flying insects and spiders.
After a really long time it was getting really crowded in places, this lead to a new period, called Carboniferous which means coal. This is when the forests grew huge and prospered and after a very long time eventually all died, and somehow millions of years later became what is now coal. The tetrapods had a new system of reproduction, they developed eggs that they would lay in their nests. This got them out of the water for reproduction, and more of them just stayed on the land.
Meanwhile on the bottom of the ocean the trilobites, which were so popular and successful for such a long time, now were not doing so well. The fishes with jaws were become more popular and the trilobites died off. The coral reefs were doing really well and life was abundant in the oceans, some of the newest critters crawling around on the bottom of the ocean were the delicious nautiloids (clams and snails) and swimming around above the bottom of the ocean came the ammonoids (octopuses and squid). On the surface, breathing air, the latest critters included dragonflies and in the forest the new style was cones. The trees were experimenting with new ways to reproduce themselves and much later they became what now are called conifers or pine trees.
The animals had a wide range of developments going on, in the sea were lizards and eels, and something new called archosaurs, which much later became crocodiles. The smaller bugs had some new models that later became cockroaches, and they always have done really well. Change just kept on coming. The next period is called the Permian period, which was named after a city, called Perm, in what is now Russia.
This was a difficult time, the Permian period did not end well. Life was abundant and there were lots of different creatures running around, eating each other and growing larger and larger, developing in unique ways to survive and take advantage of what was plentiful at the time. But the Earth was always changing, there were volcanoes and changes in the weather, and the supercontinents were shifting. They have always been slowly moving or drifting. Pangaea had become the newest and largest supercontinent. When volcanoes erupted they put lots of dust and smoke in the air, which blocked out the sunshine and whole place got cold again and the plants did not get as much light for photosynthesis. It was cold again for a long time. The Permian period ended the Paleozoic era, it was a time of mass extinction and most of the life on Earth died. Not all life forms died, but it was a rough time for all. The music is much more upbeat than the story.
I hear some whistling synthesizer sounds, a little trickling water, a piano, slow beautiful moments with a melodic framework. There is sort of a hint of a jungle sound as the song progresses.
MESOZOIC ERA
Mesozoic means "middle animals" and the new main critters were dinosaurs. The word dinosaur means "terrible lizard." The synthesizer jungle-rainforest continues to become more sophisticated, here there are more bird songs. The new plants at the beginning of the Mesozoic time were ferns, meet the cycads, ginkgophytes and bennettitaleans. Ferns cover the ground and have no flowers or seeds and are vascular, they move water from their roots up to their fronds or leaves to do the photosynthesis dance.
There were three periods in the Mesozoic era, the first was the Triassic period, followed by the Jurassic period, when the first movies about dinosaurs were made. Everyone was eating everyone else and it was not a good time to be small.
The Cretaceous period lasted 79 million years and was warm, the water was high with lots of shallows. Pangaea broke up into the northern continent, Laurasia, and the southern continent, Gondwana. Laurasia became North America and Eurasia; Gondwana split into South America, Africa, Australia, Antarctica and the Indian subcontinent.
Then something happened and once again life almost ended everywhere, and now we call this the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
CENOZOIC ERA
This is the Age of Mammals. The lizard fashion changed, everyone got hairy and grew breasts. This took a long time. Imagine a processional feeling, calm enduring steps slowly repeated. The story of change synthesizer melodies and majestic layers a melody that is timeless with swirling overhead and there is some fuzzy buzzing going on underfoot. The birds sing and cry, a piano voice emerges and proceeds to slowly dance, with an ethereal background singer. I hear flocks of birds feeding.
There were seven epochs in the Cenozoic era: the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene. Maybe these words will inspire future scholars to learn more. Now you have some new words to Google, children.
There were the "hell pigs", and eventually there might have been the first early whales. And on land there might have been early rhinos. Alas, no humans for a long time. Once they got started they quickly took over everything and conquered everywhere they could.
ANTHROPOCENE
Now is the time of human influences. Hear distant supersonic jets or rockets exploding in the background while the melody plays. I hear birds in the jungle. It gets quiet. I hear surf crashing while once again those jets roar overhead, and there are layers of synthesizers; on come the drums, like a heartbeat, and at times the music fades and almost stops but then it slowly rebuilds.
PRECAMBRIAN
Once more, from the top, telling the whole tale from Hades to Humans again, in a shorter amount of time.
Time travel is an exciting concept, so far nobody can prove that it will not work, but as of this writing, nobody has patented anything yet. This could be your opportunity. The music on this album might help. The musicians have done a great job with their work, I have listened to it many times and I highly recommend that you hear it too. It might be a catalyst for new ideas, new interpretations of the evidence we have found so far, new ways of finding more evidence, and new lessons to apply for how we move forward. We have been here a long time, but things can change quickly and it is important to figure out how to survive again. Do we learn to travel, or do we build new shelters, or something else? All of the above would probably be best. Whatever works, keep doing it and try to make it even better. Time goes by.
Tracks
1 HADEAN EON 04.56
2 ARCHEAN EON 06.40
3 PROTEROZOIC EON 11.33
4 PALEOZOIC ERA 07.06
5 MESOZOIC ERA 06.51
6 CENOZOIC ERA 07.47
7 ANTHROPOCENE 05.59
8 PRECAMBRIAN 11.40
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