00:00Imagine a world with no blue skies, no continents, no oxygen, just oceans of black water, and skies of ash.
00:30This is the Archean, an earth ancient beyond memory, forged by fire and ruled by extremes.
00:51The great bombardment is over, the surface has cooled, but this is no peaceful world.
01:00The planet breathes through a thousand volcanoes, the air is thick with methane, poison, the seas are heavy with metal and heat, lightning rips through permanent storms.
01:13And yet, in this darkness, something stirs.
01:21Here, in the depths, where the sun's light cannot reach, life begins, not as creatures, not as plants, but as chemistry with purpose.
01:38Simple molecules, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, drawn together by heat and minerals, by chance, by time, by the silent pull of physics.
01:51In the crucible of earth's fury, a miracle unfolds.
01:58Molecules link, they copy themselves, they compete, they evolve.
02:06These are not cell, not yet, but they are alive, and from them will come every form of life that ever was.
02:16The Archean is not a time of giants.
02:19It is a time of foundation, a time of builders, of architects of the invisible.
02:26Microbes, ancient, unseen, begin to shape the world itself.
02:37They do not move, they do not breathe oxygen, but they change the ocean, they change the atmosphere, they change the earth.
02:46Some begin to harness the sun, releasing oxygen, molecule by molecule, into a world not yet ready to breathe it.
02:56They are carving the future with every breath.
03:01The Archean lasted two billion years, longer than every complex life form has ever existed.
03:16In that time, earth was reshaped from the inside out.
03:20Continents began to rise, crust hardened, oceans shifted.
03:25But most of all, life endured.
03:28Invisible, eternal, unstoppable.
03:32In every cell of your body, echoes the Archean.
03:36In your DNA, still lives that first whisper from the dark sea.
03:41We are not just from the stars.
03:44We are born of black oceans, iron skies, and a spark that refused to die.
