yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can't find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?
Go to Iceland and there are huge fields of lava rocks covered in a thick yellow-greenish moss because there isn't enough soil for anything else to grow. It is surreal and probably what most of the earth looked like for those 40 million years
You're thinking about this like it's just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.
So you've got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.
Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.
And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it's this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it's over as fast as it started.
It always staggers me when I remember that for roughly sixty million years during the Carboniferous Period, there were trees but no microorganisms capable of decomposing them.
Just sixty million years of branches falling off and trees falling down and... just sitting there on the ground, not rotting at all.
Note that although species can be described as tree-like, they didn't quite look like modern trees do. Also, much of the world was swamp, and much of the dead plant material sank into these bogs and decayed into peat.
The amount of CO2 trapped during this period caused the atmosphere to be around 35% oxygen. This allowed life with inefficient respiratory systems to grow much bigger in size without suffocating, mainly insects. Think woodlice 6 feet long, spiders the size of dogs, millipedes as big as cars, and dragonflies as big as eagles.
Just like there is SpaceEngine, we need a Earth sim that let's us to back to any time and have a realistic simulation of that epoch based on the best of modern knowledge.
but imagine you've just gotten use to living on a moss planet over the past 40 million years, and now all of a sudden you walk outside and all the moss is gone
Thanks for make me realize that I had that big of a timespan to live in a beautiful mossy earth and I just missed it and landed on scorched land earth.