SLIDE 5.
Another three billion
years have passed. The solar system has completed almost sixteen
orbits of the galactic core, and is now unimaginably distant from
the stellar nursery which birthed it. Mars has dried, although
occasional volcanic eruptions periodically blanket it in cloud.
Venus is even hotter. But something strange is happening to Earth.
Luna has drifted farther from its primary, the tides quieting;
meanwhile, the atmosphere has acquired a strange bluish tinge,
evident sign of contamination by a toxic haze of oxygen. The great
landmass Rodina, which dominated the southern ocean beneath a cap
of ice, has broken up and the shallow seas of the Pan thalassic and
Panafrican Oceans are hosting an astonishing proliferation of
multicellular life.