Geological Timeline Individual Reflection

     In this project, we made a geological timeline to show different events in the course of Earth.  I found that there are three events in Earth's history that stood out to me the most.  The first event is the diversification of vascular plants.  A scientist can look at fossils to see that more plants are around but plants increase the amount of oxygen and decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, making Earth more habitable.  This eventually led to different mammals and eventually us, humans, living on the Earth in a suitable environment.  The second event is the Permian Extinction.  An extinction may seem like a bad thing, but this allows newer and fitter animals to roam the planet.  Reptiles, marine, and terrestrial organisms radiate during this period while many present day insects dominate.  This is a significant event in Earth's history because many of the larger animals went extinct while the smaller animals survived.  This can be seen as natural selection, as I learned in Biology class.  The third event is the origin of primate groups.  The arrival or primate groups are important to us because it gave rise to humans.  Without these primate groups existing, we may have never existed on this planet or we would have been significantly different.

     During the course of this project, we discovered more and more about how long Earth has been existing.  Since astronomical numbers such as light years are hard to comprehend, the Earth's scale is a little more understandable.  Earth's history is can be measured with eras and periods.  In the beginning eras, nothing much happened because the Earth is still taking its shape.  However, as time progresses, Earth undergoes more and more events.  Eventually towards the end, there are so many things happening it is hard to draw and write all the major events.  The amount of events that happened towards the end of the timeline really shocked me because the events seemed like it all happened in the recent years.

     The amount of progress humans have made during such a short amount of time has really left me dismayed.  We have been around for such a short amount of time, yet we still find ourselves asking each other to stop and save the environment.  All the mammals that lived before us managed to not destroy the Earth for a long amount of time.  However, we perform such detrimental actions such as the burning of fossil fuels and throwing plastic into the ocean.  We have managed to hurt the Earth so much, but we also have had many important discoveries such as writing with pencil and paper and high tech things such as the internet.  All the things we use today were discovered by someone not too long ago.

     I still wonder about how much longer Earth's history will be.  I learned about how we are only in a blink of an eye in terms of Earth's history but I do not know how much longer it will be.  I do not have an estimate because if we are only a blink of an eye, the history would be so large one could not comprehend.  Also, I wonder about the different actions we perform that hurt the environment.  Burning fossil fuels really hurts the environment, but I do not know how much longer we could really keep doing this and still living on Earth.