The evolution of life in 60 seconds

Seed Magazine recently posted a rather neat video called "The Evolution of Life in 60 Seconds" which, as the name suggests, is an attempt to depict the 4.6 billion year history of life on Earth into a single minute, in the form of a changing cluster of words. It's a cute little video and gives you a good sense for just how incredibly recent everything we take for granted actually is.

I find it hard to put into words just how captivating I find the history of the Earth (which Wikipedia has an excellent article on), and even more so how utterly inspiring I find it that we have actually been able to figure out as much about it as we have. I have thought for a while now that if I ever inexplicably find myself with an extreme excess of time and money and the desire to develop an entirely new tool set that I would love to participate in a project to make a documentary which squeezes those 4.6 billion years into say, 120 or 150 minutes. I would like it to be something completely accessible to, say, a 14 year old, who is soon to have to make decisions about what to study in high school, but still interesting to adults. I'd also like to try to balance the emphasis between simple statement facts - "this is what happened, and when" - and an explanation of the scientific processes which led us to those facts - "this is how we know what happened", or perhaps better "this is why we think this happened": Just-so stories won't inspire anybody.