Tideglass Studio
The eight stages

Stage 8 of 8

Living World

Gains: Biosphere

Life takes hold. You are a living world, the rarest thing there is.

In your warm seas chemistry crosses a line and begins to copy itself. You are alive.

Hydrothermal vents on an early ocean floor where life may begin.

Chemistry that copies itself

Somewhere in your warm water, near a hot vent or a drying tide pool, the chemistry grew complicated enough to make copies of itself. That is the only line that matters. Once a thing can copy itself with small mistakes, the slow patient editor of natural selection takes over, and life is loose on a world.

A living planet with blue oceans, green continents, and white clouds.

A world that breathes

Life remade you from the surface down. Tiny ocean cells learned to drink sunlight and breathed out oxygen, and over ages that oxygen filled your sky and turned it blue. Green spread across your land. You are no longer just a planet. You are a living world, the rarest kind we know, and the only one we have ever found.

True things

  • Abiogenesis is the origin of self-copying life from ordinary chemistry.
  • Early microbes oxygenated Earth's air in the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago.
  • Earth is still the only living world humanity has ever found.