I love learning about old science, preferably billions of years old.
However, I never really thought much about the beginning of the Earth. My textbooks showed lots of small rocks smashing together to become bigger rocks. They eventually became planetoids and then planets. This took 10-15 million years, which is pretty fast in geologic time. Made sense to me.
An article I read reduces that number quite a bit. A new theory proposes that the Earth formed not slowly with rocks smashing together, but quickly with dust becoming planets. This process would have taken only five million years.
If the history of the Earth was a 24-hour day, the formation of the Earth would be five to fifteen minutes in the old theory and a minute and a half in the new one. That’s a lot faster.
If you want to learn the science behind these dates, the article goes into more detail.
What I found interesting was the conclusion. If it takes so little time to make a planet, then perhaps the number of exoplanets out there is higher than we first thought. And the more exoplanets there are, the better chance one of them has life, or even better, intelligent life. And wouldn’t it be cool if we found it?