Stage 8
Earth
The living chapter — oceans, air, life
Oceans, breathable air, a biosphere. The only world we know that completed the sequence into a living planet.
What missions and papers show
The only detected biosphere. Continents typically 35–40 km thick. A field that almost died near 565 million years and recovered by about 532. The fossil record is Earth’s.
How this site reads it
Living Earth is the present chapter. The dated chapters of the fossil record can be laid on eight equal windows. That mapping is a ruler. It is not a finding of animals on the other worlds.
What would kill this stage
If everything about Earth is explained as a first-generation inner planet, with nothing left from an earlier stage, the cycle reading of Earth comes off the table.