lpetrich
Contributor
Looking over time does not give very good results for habitability, either. Let's look at our planet's past. We emerged in an environment with lots of convenient-sized land and aquatic animals, and also plants to gather: fruits, nuts, grains, leaves, shoots, and roots. We also had plenty of oxygen to breathe. How far back can we go?
Most of our food plants are angiosperms, and they dominated the land flora since the early to mid Cretaceous, roughly 130 - 100 Mya.
Before that, the most common land plants were gymnosperms like conifers and cycads. Some of their seeds are edible nuts, seeds like pine nuts. But it would be hard to get much of a harvest of them. One can make soup from pine needles, but one would have to boil it down to make it more concentrated. Ferns were also around, and some ferns have edible rolled-up stems or fiddleheads. Some ferns also have rhizomes, sort of thick roots, and some of them may be edible.
Ferns and seed plants first appeared in the late Devonian, 360 to 385 Mya, and before them were more primitive land plants like lycopods and mosses. Around the beginning of the Devonian, almost 420 Mya, land plants were very short and mosslike. The first ones likely lived around 480 - 450 Mya, in the Ordovician.
In the water, macroscopic algae likely went back much further, well into the Proterozoic, but it's hard to find much on eukaryotic-macroalgae fossils. But there was another kind of "algae" that went back into the Archean, over 2.5 billion years ago: stromatolites. These structures are built up by cyanobacteria, blue-green "algae", by trapping sediment. So one have to scrape off top layers and strain out the sedment. But there was likely a lot of cyanobacteria in the oceans and lakes that was much easier to extract. In any case, having nothing but Spirulina day in and day out might get monotonous.
Farther and farther back, it gets worse and worse. Like trying to harvest slime from hydrothermal vents.
Most of our food plants are angiosperms, and they dominated the land flora since the early to mid Cretaceous, roughly 130 - 100 Mya.
Before that, the most common land plants were gymnosperms like conifers and cycads. Some of their seeds are edible nuts, seeds like pine nuts. But it would be hard to get much of a harvest of them. One can make soup from pine needles, but one would have to boil it down to make it more concentrated. Ferns were also around, and some ferns have edible rolled-up stems or fiddleheads. Some ferns also have rhizomes, sort of thick roots, and some of them may be edible.
Ferns and seed plants first appeared in the late Devonian, 360 to 385 Mya, and before them were more primitive land plants like lycopods and mosses. Around the beginning of the Devonian, almost 420 Mya, land plants were very short and mosslike. The first ones likely lived around 480 - 450 Mya, in the Ordovician.
In the water, macroscopic algae likely went back much further, well into the Proterozoic, but it's hard to find much on eukaryotic-macroalgae fossils. But there was another kind of "algae" that went back into the Archean, over 2.5 billion years ago: stromatolites. These structures are built up by cyanobacteria, blue-green "algae", by trapping sediment. So one have to scrape off top layers and strain out the sedment. But there was likely a lot of cyanobacteria in the oceans and lakes that was much easier to extract. In any case, having nothing but Spirulina day in and day out might get monotonous.
Farther and farther back, it gets worse and worse. Like trying to harvest slime from hydrothermal vents.
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Every IDiot is attempting to appeal to science to hide their cult beliefs.
