[wolverine876]

We are talking about two different things. I don't mean that there weren't any football games and thus nothing interesting happened.

If you look at a timeline, you might see:

  - 3.5  bya: First prokaryote
  - 2.5  bya: FIrst eukaryote
  - 0.6  bya: Cambrian explosion
  - 0.44 bya: First terrestrial life

All the text you see is about change. But 99.99999...% of that time, there is no such event. We write about and think about the changes, not the vast eons when nothing changes (except excruciatingly gradually). After the Cambrian Explosion, trilobytes multiplied and took over the world, but that was (I'm guessing) over millions years; if you were there, you wouldn't see a vast herd (school?) of them advancing across the landscape one day. Short of a few big extinction events (at least the K/T that killed the dinosaurs), I don't think you would notice any such change at all if you lived at any time in history. But now I'm thinking about whether one of those events could be sudden and dramatic.

[Stevvo]

To me it comes across as hubris to claim 'nothing happened' for hundreds of millions of years just because we can't see any evidence for it. Looking into the fossil record tells us very little about what was going on hundreds of millions of years ago, despite it being the best tool we have for looking back at such long scales.

[wolverine876]

> To me it comes across as hubris to claim 'nothing happened' for hundreds of millions of years just because we can't see any evidence for it.

I think that's an important perspective, but I am not seeing how it applies in this case: We're talking mostly about evolutionary changes. For example, right now evolution is happening but it's unlikely that you or I will ever notice it in our relatively short lifespans. And the chance of an event as big as the first eukaryote or the K/T extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) is very, very tiny.

For around the first billion years of earth's history, there was no life at all (as best we can tell right now) - nada, zilch, 'nothing' happening evolutionarily, for most intents and purposes (afaik).