By
Viewed
5,319,937
Please choose the correct answer for each question below:
Questions: 0/119
Correct: 0
Translate:
Your time machine broke and you are
stuck in the worst time in history.
It feels like you stepped into an oven.
There are no plants or any vegetation,
and almost no moisture in the air. The sunlight
smashing down from the cloudless and weirdly
colored sky is reflected by an endless sea of red
and orange sand dunes stretching over the horizon,
for thousands of kilometers.Dust devils the size
of buildings dance over the hellish landscape.
You are in the Early Triassic, Hothouse
Earth 250 million years ago, a few million
years after the worst mass extinction in
history. The planet is still suffering from
a permanent fever. Volcanism and the runaway
greenhouse effect has transformed the planet
into hell. There is three to five times
more CO2 in the air than in the human era.
The formation of the massive supercontinent Pangea
led to the largest desert in history that
barely sees any rain. The gigantic ocean is
warm even deep below. Two superheated
currents circulate around the globe,
pumping extreme amounts of heat and moisture into
the atmosphere. There is no ice even at the poles.
Seems like you are stuck in the center of the
desert, isolated by endless ancient land masses.
One of the most hostile environments
Earth has ever produced. The deserts
we know are still full of life, but not
this one. Its core is starved of moisture
and the air is bone-dry. Your skin dries
out immediately and your lips begin to
crack. The CO2-rich air is easily 50°C and
sears your lungs with every labored breath.
The rubber soles of your boots begin
to melt. Your sweat evaporates before
it could cool you and your exposed
skin begins to crack within minutes.
Suddenly it becomes even hotter
as a red sandstorm envelopes the
landscape. Like thousands of tiny
sparks, burning hot sand hits your
skin. You stumble back into your machine
and press buttons at random – it can’t
do time travel but it can still move.
You’re pressing your machine’s buttons
at random – it can’t do time
travel but it can still move.
You shoot over some of the mightiest
mountains Earth has ever seen.
Eventually, you stop at the
shores of the Tethys Sea.
The vast shallow ocean looks more like a
swamp, among scattered groups of waist high
ferns and spindly stems with tufted foliage. A few
Lystrosaurus feeding on them eye you curiously.
The water is murky and looks sickly and milky.
Colourful mats of bacteria float
on the surface like oil slicks.
The air is hot and humid like a steam
room. It’s hard to breathe and your
sweat can’t evaporate and cool you. Even
the water can’t give you any relief – it
is as hot as a freshly-run bath tub.
This hot ocean can’t hold much oxygen,
especially in deeper layers. Bacteria and
bivalves are the only species that thrive here.
The waves move almost sluggishly through
this thick bacterial soup. When they break,
they leave behind a glistening iridescent film.
Each wave that hits the shore releases a
mist that makes your eyes and throat burn,
carrying the rotten-egg stench of hydrogen
sulfide up from the oxygen-starved depths.
Barely conscious from the heat and smell
and CO2, you look at the horizon. A storm
is building unlike any you've ever seen. The
hot ocean feeds it endless energy and with
no continents to slow it down it will dwarf the
fiercest hurricanes of your time. You are doomed.
Your broken time machine jolts and screeches,
something is happening…
You are near the equator, in the late
Carboniferous, 320 million years ago.
The atmosphere is thick with moisture. The
climate is locked in a never ending wet super summer,
without any other seasons. Colliding continents
are covered by the largest swamps the planet
will ever see. A paradise for plants, growing
faster than their dead biomass can decompose. The
ground beneath is a warm, soggy mass of decaying
vegetation. What will be an endless desert in 70
million years is now an endless alien jungle. A
huge variety of life is thriving in this period.
From your perspective this is
not that great. You are lost
in a maze of giant tree-like plants
towering over a twisted undergrowth
of giant ferns and endless varieties
of bizarre and unfamiliar vegetation.
The thick humid air smells of sweet decay but
breathing makes you dizzy - your vision seems
too sharp, your thoughts slightly frantic.
The dense plant cover has supercharged the
atmosphere with oxygen, 60% higher than in the
human era, and your body is trying to cope.
Which is great for the dominant land animals
which have conquered every niche of this majestic
garden: bugs. You are stuck in the golden age of
arthropods. In this oxygen-rich world, they have
evolved to sizes that will never be possible
again. They are innumerable and everywhere.
Armoured cat-sized Megarachne crash through
the undergrowth, hunting a swarm of panicked
roachoids that scatter in all directions. Above
you a griffinfly with wings spanning nearly a
meter and beating like helicopter blades catches a
Palaeodictyoptera mid-flight. You stumble through
the bushes filled with countless crawling
creatures as an Arthropleura the length of
a car picks its way through the ferns, moving
countless legs in hypnotic waves. You reach
a swampy clearing and stumble into the shallow
water, dizzy and terrified as a Pulmonoscorpius
rips apart its prey, eying you with some interest.
Here in the clearing you can see the sky above
the canopy glow shrieking red, intensifying at an
alarming pace. The extreme humidity here creates
sudden, violent thunderstorms. And the oxygen-rich
atmosphere makes everything dangerously flammable.
Even the wet vegetation can burst into explosive
flame with the slightest spark. Why do all of your
trips end in a storm? Well, at least it will take
all the creatures that want to eat you with it…
Your broken time machine jolts back to
life, the world is folding in on itself.
You’ve woken wake up in the Early
Devonian 400 million years ago.
Much of the planet is covered in shallow seas,
while the land is mostly rocky plains and
mountains broken by braided rivers and mudflats.
Earth is in a state of transition. For about 100
million years life has begun to break down rocks
into soil – a soft layer that enables plants to
grow and life thrive. The ozone layer is slowly
building up, fed by organisms releasing gases.
Recently this process has been speeding up, the
land is turning from toxic to semi habitable.
The sky looks wrong somehow.
The sun blazes harsh and white,
barely filtered by the unfamiliar atmosphere.
The air feels thin with only 15% oxygen compared
to today’s 21. Each breath feels shallow
and unsatisfying. You are on the verge of
passing out and can only move slowly. At least
it is currently moderately warm and not stormy.
But it's what dominates these lands that
makes this world truly alien. Reaching up
to 8 meters into the sky are massive obelisks
of fungal Prototaxites. As you walk closer,
you notice spores catching the sunlight, drifting
through the air like tiny stars. Your movement
disturbs more of them, creating clouds suspended
in the thin atmosphere. They coat your skin with
a fine, powdery, itchy film. You try not
to think about how many you're inhaling
with every breath in this oxygen-poor air.
The ground feels nothing like soil. It's mostly
rock partly covered by a thin, slightly springy
layer of decomposing matter. Some shallow water
pools reflect the pale alien sky above.
Between the fungal towers, there is a
carpet of smaller fungi and a few alien-like
primitive plants – no flowers, no leaves,
just strange green stalks and fern-like
structures that reach your ankles.
Around you, the fungal towers rise like pale
pillars, their surfaces neither smooth nor rough
but something in between. They're neither wet nor
dry, slightly yielding under your touch. Small
patches of what might be lichen create splashes
of muted greens and yellows on their surfaces.
The only animals you can spot are a
few insects burrowing into the large
mushrooms. Everything is eerily quiet.
You sit down on a rock. Is this it?
As the night approaches, the pale sky shifts
into sickly purples and greys bleeding into
the darkness. No animal sounds announce the
coming night. Just the solemn whisper of the
prototaxites creaking in the wind. Through the
thin atmosphere the stars and the milky way
illuminate the scenery with unsettling
clarity. The fungal towers loom as pale
shapes against the starlit sky, their
silhouettes seeming even more wrong
in the darkness. You are utterly alone -
a time traveler lost in an alien world…
Your time machine sputters…
What now?
Time to start rebuilding civilization! And
while a hammer and saw would come in handy,
the single most important tool you’ll need
is your mind. Enter our friends at Brilliant,
who can transform your mind into a Swiss Army
knife capable of tackling all kinds of problems.
Brilliant helps you get smarter every
day, with thousands of bite-size,
interactive lessons on anything
you might be curious about.
Level up your skills in math
and logic with hands-on,
visual challenges that feel like a
game. Learn to think like a scientist,
exploring the physics of everything from a game of
pool to black holes. And plug into the big ideas
powering technology as you build real skills
in programming, AI, data analysis, and more.
Brilliant has a huge library of lessons to
explore, with new lessons added each month.
In each one, you learn through discovery—by
trying things yourself. In just minutes a day,
you’ll become a better thinker and problem solver,
with all the tools you need to
transform the world for the better.
To explore everything Brilliant has
to offer for free for a full 30 days,
visit Brilliant.org/nutshell
or click on the link in the
description. You’ll also get 20%
off an annual premium subscription.
Related Songs