Old Age

The Old Age or the Ancient Era was the entire span of history preceding the catastrophe on December 21, 2012. The Old Age included all of the history spanning back to the time before the creation of the Earth to the minutes before the impact of alitronium capsule. In the New Age, humans attempted to study & piece together history by the oral passing of history through the survivors of the catastrophe & the mining of certain artifacts.

Hadean Eon
4.6 billion years (bya) prior to 2012, the Earth formed from gases, dust & space rocks that were from the remains of the early solar system. The newborn planet was a molten ball of liquid rock, an ocean of lava. Because of the heat, the time was called the Hadean, as it was named after Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld. The atmosphere contained little or no oxygen, but contained gases that in their amounts then were lethal to any aerobic life. The entire rotation of the Earth on it's axis was quicker, being 6 hours total (3 hours a day, 3 hours a night). As the planet got older, the rotation slowed. 100 million years later, the Earth's Moon formed as an asteroid & was captured by the gravity of the Earth. 700 million years after the formation of the planet, when the surface of the Earth cooled into a crust, a storm of meteors hailed the Earth. This was called the Late Heavy Bombardment & it lasted for 100 million years. The meteors all contained tiny crystals of water that created the first oceans of the world. The Moon, being much closer than it was during the present day, caused megastorms that had deadly high tides. Over the course of the Bombardment, the lunar orbit began to distance away from the Earth to it's location in the 2000s, calming the seas. Islands formed from the rise of molten lava under the ocean surface due to the instability of the heat of the Earth's core. The Bombardment concluded at the end of the Hadean Eon, which the meteors in the Bombardment carryed minerals of carbon & proteins that dissolved in the ocean water.

Archean Eon
The Archean Eon was named after the bacteria kingdom & domains called Archaea. 3.8 billion years before the present, the minerals from the meteors in the Late Heavy Bombardment floated around the ocean until they reached small towns of hydrothermal "black smoker" vents, which the minerals mixed with the iron & sulfuric chemicals in the water. The combination somehow created the first ever life on Earth: prokaryotic, or unicellular, bacteria that lived in anaerobic environments to remain alive. 3.5 bya, the bacteria underwent mutations & evolved into a new species called cyanobacteria. Cyanobacteria mixed with the minerals of the shallow seas off the shores of islands & created towers called stromatolites. The cyanobacteria used the sun's light, water & carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to produce a simple sugar called glucose & the gas oxygen. Over 2 billion years, the stromatolites would pump oxygen into the atmosphere, causing some of the earlier bacteria to die off because of the toxicity of the gas from the anaerobic environments. The oceans, which were full of iron from the hydrothermal vents, began to lose the iron as the oxygen mixed to create rust, which was heavier & caused the iron oxide to fall to the ocean's bottom to become the iron ore that the present-day miners collected to build everything.

Proterozoic Eon
In the early Proterozoic Eon, certain strands of bacteria discovered how to reproduce sexually. Until then, the bacterial populations reproduced asexually, duplicating their genes to create a double of themselves, genetic diversity was reserved for mutations. 1.5 bya, the Earth was dotted with volcanic islands in an atmosphere filling with oxygen. The Earth's core, which was white-hot, produced enough heat that the crust teared itself into tectonic plates that shifted around the planet, causing islands to collide & merge into bigger pieces of land. Over the course of 400 million years, the islands are pulled until they create the first supercontinent, called Rodinia. The stromatolites from the Archean reappeared in the shallow waters surrounding Rodinia. The landscape could be described as the place being like the neighboring planet of Mars. The days were 16 hours long. 750 million years (mya) before the present, Rodinia broke apart into two separate continents. Because of the separation, in 650 mya, a massive amount of volcanoes appear on both continents, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, the carbon dioxide was absorbed by the rocks out of the atmosphere when it fell to Earth in the form of acid rain. Over the course of 90 million years, the temperature slowly declines to around minus 60 degrees. 558 mya, the Earth enters a period of freezing cold that is where snow is everywhere until two massive ice sheets, formed at the poles, spread out to meet at the Equator. This period of a 15 million year glaciation was called Snowball Earth. Snowball Earth was considered the longest, coldest ice age in the history of Earth. The entire glaciation caused the delay of eukaryotic life from appearing on Earth. 543 mya, before the end of the Precambrian, the volcanoes, which had been erupting since the world started freezing, broke through the ice & introduced carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because no rocks could absorb the carbon dioxide, being covered in ice, it became the greenhouse gases that formed layers over the Earth's surface to trap heat on the planet. The ice melted back to the poles & the climate became warmer. During the melting, the ice & sunlight reacted to create hydrogen peroxide, which was a bond of two hydrogen & two oxygen atoms. The bonds were broken with sunlight, causing more water & more oxygen to appear on the Earth. With more oxygen, evolution began to create more life.

Paleozoic Era
The Phanerozoic Eon, as well as the Paleozoic Era, began with the Cambrian Explosion, a massive population explosion under the ocean waters due to the higher levels of oxygen in the air due to the melting of Snowball Earth.