Billions of years ago the earth’s atmosphere was too toxic to support life as we know it today. There was not enough oxygen in the air to support anything like the abundant animal and plant life that we know and enjoy.There was water, however. And in that water lived microscopic cyanobacteria, converting sunlight into oxygen through photosynthesis. For billions of years, these microbes just kept putting oxygen out into that toxic atmosphere. Finally, one day a threshold was crossed. There was a great oxygenation event. There was enough oxygen to allow life to explode, and the forms that we know and recognize began to form. For billions of years, that cyanobacteria labored away, pumping life sustaining bubbles of air into the environment, with seemingly no purpose or result, and then one day, boom. The existence of Life!
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