Question: how was plants made at the start of the world

Sam Mugford answered on 18 Mar 2023:

Plants didn’t appear until (relatively) quite recently in the history of the world. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and the first life was probably about half a billion years later. All the early life was bacteria for a very long time. The first plants as we know them evolved from simpler life about half a billion years ago, when the Earth was already 4 billion years old. by comparison, humans have only been around for a few hundreds of thousands of years, a tiny fraction of the time that plants have been around.

How were plants made? All life, including plants, was made by evolution- the gradual change over time over many generations. The main force that causes evolution is called natural selection. Any life form that emerges that can survive better than others will have more children (or seedlings if it’s a plant), so they will become the commonest life forms. It’s a simple idea, but it explains how all life got here. When plants first evolved they had the ability to capture sunlight to make energy and to extract nutrients from the ground, so this made them very successful and they quickly took over the world.