A while back, I got the idea for a massive project involving the question "what if evolutionary history on earth were rewinded"? Clearly, due to evolution's propensity for randomness, life would be very different. It would be like an Exobiology project, but with all the atmospheric compostion and terrain and whatnot made up for you.
I even made some clipart (as you can see above), and went so far as to write an intro for a page that never came to be:
"It is in the nature of evolution to be completely random: after all, all evolution is is random, chance mutations in a life-form's genome that happen to be beneficial to the said life-form. Millions of generations accumulate these beneficial mutations, all of which are tiny traits which lead this life-form to be different and better suited to its environment than its predecessor. It should then logically follow that if time on earth were rewinded all the way back to the time when life first appeared, that, due to evolution's haphazardness, life would evolve in ways completely different compared to the life of our world. And if this life were to evolve continuously towards the present day, we would see increasingly different and alien life forms, as a millenia of mutations collectively brought these creatures further and further away – superficially, behaviourally, and fundamentally – from life as we know it."
What do you guys think? COmmunity project material? Or just junk?