About 530 million years ago, a spectacular event occurred regarding life on our planet. For most of the nearly 4 billion years that life had existed on Earth up to that time, the only life forms consisted of bacteria, plankton, and multi-celled algae. Then suddenly (in geological terms), something truly momentous happened. The genesis known as the Cambrian Explosion took place. Over the time scale spanning from 500 to 540 million years ago, all the main lines of animal types, whose descendants fill the world today, were established. A period of 40 million years sounds like a long time but compared to the preceding 4 billion years, it is a blink of the eye. In terms of geological time, the Cambrian Explosion was instantaneous. All of this happened in the oceans. The entire land surface of our planet was utterly devoid of life. Outside the oceans, there was not a single blade of grass. There were no trees, no insects, no flowers, no animals; nothing but a barren, lifeless, primeval, alien landscape. We know all of these things because we have an excellent, reliably datable Cambrian fossil record, both in British Columbia and in China. The moon was closer then and would have appeared immense in the sky, clearly visible in daylight, and blindingly bright at night. Now the moon is further away, and eventually we will lose it altogether (it is moving away from us at a rate of about 3.8 centimeters per year) Today’s rendering attempts to present all of the above conditions in one image. I always appreciate everybody’s comments because I never know if I succeed at these things until I get feedback. Created in Ultra Fractal