I’ve been thinking about the GOE, the Cambrian Explosion, and the emergence of the mammals a lot lately, because I’m pretty sure we’re in the midst of a similarly disruptive and pivotal moment in history that I’m calling the Great Digitization Event, or GDE.
In addition to being a massive extinction event, the oxygenation of the planet kicked off the evolution of multicellular organisms (620 to 550 million years ago), the Cambrian explosion of new species (540 million years ago), and an ice age that triggered the end of the dinosaurs and many cold-blooded species, leading to the emergence of the mammals as the apex group (66 million years ago) and eventually resulting in the appearance of Homo sapiens, with all of their social sophistication and complexity (315,000 years ago).
Oxygen was toxic to many anaerobic cousins, and most of them died off. A new type of bacteria, cyanobacteria, had emerged, and it had the photosynthetic ability to produce glucose and oxygen out of carbon dioxide and water using the power of the sun.
Somewhere between 2 and 3 billion years ago, what scientists call the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE, took place, causing the mass extinction of anaerobic bacteria, the dominant life form at the time.