Today we talk about the Hadean eon, the fiery, hellish dawn of Earth's history when our planet was a chaotic crucible of molten rock and relentless cosmic bombardment.

Spanning from the formation of the solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago to 4.0 billion years ago, this eon - named after Hades, the Greek god of the underworld - was a time before stable continents, before an oxygenated atmosphere, and long before life took root. In this episode, we are traveling back to a nightmare world where Earth's surface was a churning sea of glowing magma, continuously reshaped by intense volcanism and swept by the scorching radiation of a young Sun.

We’re dissecting the cataclysmic events that forged our home world, including the colossal collision with a Mars-sized protoplanet named Theia - an impact so violent it re-melted Earth's outer  ...