but imagine you’ve just gotten use to living on a moss planet over the past 40 million years, and now all of a sudden you walk outside and all the moss is gone

The ocean was purple once, and another time the only thing taller than little bushes were twenty foot tall mushrooms shaped like asparagus

FWIW a lot of “moss” from that time was very unlike what we think of as moss today.

You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.

So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.

Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.

And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.

That moss have been long and painful to wait for this.

yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can’t find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?

Edit:

happy Kris noises

Is difficult to take such an interesting fact seriously when is presented in such a stupid way.