The story begins early in the morning, around 4am, with the rise of the first simple, single-cell organisms.

在清晨4点左右，故事伴随着第一个简的生物的出现开始。

Long ago, Earth's oceans were filled with purple single-celled organisms called archaea.

很久以前，地球的海洋里满是的紫色生物，叫做古生菌。

Bacteria are single-celled, living organisms that can exist and perform life functions on their own.

菌是的活生物体，可以独立存在并执行生命功能。

Meanwhile, the general blueprint of single-celled organisms has hardly changed in 3 billion years.

与此同时，生物的总体蓝图在 30 亿年几乎没有变化。

What is the collective name for single-celled, microscopic organisms that live in the soil, water and animals?

生活在土壤、水和动物的微生物的名称是什么？

Tiny living things like bacteria or other single-celled organisms reproduce by creating exact copies of themselves.

像菌或其他生物这样的微小生物会通过确复制自己来进行繁殖。

About 3.7 billion years ago, single-celled  microbes, called prokaryotes, first evolved on our planet.

大约 37 亿年前，称为原核生物的微生物首先在我们的星球上进化。

For the first 2.5 billion years were single-celled organisms co-evolving.

最初的 25 亿年是生物共同进化的。

Fungi mushroom onto the scene in September, in a world that's almost entirely single-celled creatures.

真菌在九月崭露头角，出现在一个几乎完全由生物构成的世界。

Most unicellular reproduction is asexual, meaning one organism, on its own, can reproduce itself.

大多数生物的繁殖是无性的，这意味着一个生物体可以独自进行自我繁殖。

A second is the ratio of magnesium to calcium in forearm shells A third called text 86 relies on the composition of the membranes of a group of single-celled organisms called archaea and so on By combining all of these data.

一个是前臂壳镁与钙的比例，另一个称为文本86，依赖于一类被称为古菌的生物膜的组成，等等。通过结合所有这些数据。

Genes in the DNA of single-celled organisms put oxygen in the air, extracted CO2, put chalk and iron ore into the ground, hardly a cubic inch of the surface to some depth has remained unaffected by those genes.

生物DNA的基因将氧气释放到空气， 提取了二氧化碳，将石灰石和铁矿藏入地下，从表面到一定深度几乎每一立方英寸都受到了这些基因的影响。

If you think about like the amazing thing the human eye, the visual cortex can do, the brain, the nervous, everything that makes us more powerful than single cell organisms.

如果你思考一下人眼、视觉皮层所能实现的惊人功能，以及大脑、神经系统等一切使我们比生物更强大的因素。

Yeah, it's again, we have to somehow come to grips with the power of these little single cell organisms who've been around a lot longer than we have.

是的，我们又得设法理解这些存在时间远超我们的生物的力量。

Right, so we had only single-celled organisms for longer than we didn't have life on Earth.

没错，所以我们只有生物的时间比地球没有生命的时间还要长。

If we could somehow go back through time, meeting  every ancestor along the way from early animals to single celled microbes, all the way back to  something so simple, it can copy itself using only chemical reactions.

如果我们能够以某种方式穿越时间，一路上遇见从早期动物到微生物的每一位祖先，一直追溯到某个极其简、仅凭化学反应就能自我复制的存在。

That's what single celled things like bacteria do.

这就是像菌这样的生物所做的事情。