What Was The 'Boring Billion' Really Like?

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Researched and Written by Leila Battison
Narrated and Edited by David Kelly
Thumbnail Art and Art by Ettore Mazza
Art by Khail Kupsky
Maps by Adriano Bezerra

If you like our videos, check out Leila's Youtube channel:

Music from Epidemic Sound and Artlist, stock footage from Videoblocks.

References:

IMAGE CREDITS:

Martin Brasier Hummingbird Films (Fair Use)
Roger Buick (washington university, fair use)
Donald Canfield (fair use, PNAS)
Simon Poulton - The geochemical society (fair use)

[bigcong]

Shout-out to the cameraman who dedicated a billion years of his life to record this.

[plixplop]

Dang imagine hoping nobody will notice the stain on your shirt, then the freaking narrator puts you on blast in the opening 10 seconds

[CMBell]

Geology always sends me off on an existential panic because I remember how temporary the conditions for our survival are.

[horntail-wyvern]

I can imagine the ultimate curse. Make someone Immortal then transport them back in time to 1.8 billion years ago.

[mikekolokowsky]

I had a philosophy professor who could make a single lecture feel like a boring billion.

[AgiHammerthief]

when something has a billion to one chance of happening, you might want a billion years of stable conditions for it to happen in.

[prometheuszero]

I love the way he describes the ocean a few times, especially when he says, "That ocean is a stagnant, putrid expanse rimmed with black sludge and emitting a sulphurous stench that spans the globe". So many great words in there.

[jerrysstories]

How boring could it have been if the whole atmosphere was laughing gas?

[zibbitybibbitybop]

And people wonder why we haven't found signs of advanced alien life yet. If the most Earthlike planet of all - Earth - could spend an entire billion years with a stinking sludge ocean and not much going on evolutionarily, it's hardly a stretch to think that so many other Earthlike planets simply stay this way, if they ever get that far at all.

[Gandenkris]

I absolutely love how you focused on more modern scientists and theories, giving them the same honor and detail as you would an Einstein or Newton -- truly brilliant video showcasing brilliant science. The ocean of the Boring Billilon is truly astonishing

[flanneldaddy]

Our concept of time is so tiny. It’s absolutely insane thinking about that many years

[Greg-yuij]

The “Boring billion”is not boring when you narrate it. Great job!

[e]

for a time that's called boring, this was a quite fascinating part in the history of the Earth.
I really like how geology, chemistry, biology and even astronomy come together to give us different pieces of the larger puzzle.

[pastlife]

Conodonts aren’t tooth-shaped, it’s just that their teeth are typically the only part of them that fossilise. They would’ve looked a bit like modern lampreys or hagfish.

[Mousey]

This feels weirdly inspirational. Like no matter what you go through in life, when you somehow get to a deep end and feel like you cannot move on, nothing is happening in life and you feel stagnant, you will always do something that will lead to success in the future. It may take some time, but the end result would be a change into something better. There is always an end to bad events in life, even the Earth went through it.

[DrFreeman]

Makes me wonder if the boring billion was the great filter. Perhaps most planets don't stabilize long enough for complex eukayotic life to properly form.

[mathewadams]

So glad Curiosity Stream has recognized your skill. Amazing work as always.

[NomicFin]

There was an article in Geological Society of America's publication last year that suggested that the "boring billion" and some of the geological oddities from that era could be explained if Earth's plate tectonics stopped during the time and temporarily transitioned to an arrangement where the lithosphere formed a stable unmoving "lid" over the astenosphere, where only volcanic activity would be from places where heat would built enough to cause rocks in the lithosphere to start melting (like in modern "hot spot" volcanism). This is also what the geology of Mars was probably like before the martian astenosphere cooled too much to allow for magmatism.

[bingosunnoon]

When I started reading astronomy books, the age of the universe was given as 4.5 billion years. It is now 13.8 byo. I don't look too bad for a 9 billion year old man.

[brianthesnail]

I used to go for lectures in that Oxford museum as an undergrad. There is a big lecture theatre outside the main gallery. Walking past a dinosaur skeleton at 8.45 am just before diving into a lecture on organic chemistry exploring the very chemical building blocks that formed the biochemical soup that the ancestors of those dinosaurs emerged from. It doesn't get more inspiring than that.