The Latin root of nature literally meant birth
Nature comes from the Latin natura, meaning innate character and, originally, birth, and it translated the Greek physis, the root of physics. Over the centuries the idea has shifted from a sacred order to whatever lies beyond human interference, even as humans have become its most powerful force.
In its widest sense nature means the physical universe and its laws, elements and phenomena, life included. Although humans belong to it, human activity is often framed as separate from or even above it. As modern science took shape, nature came to be seen as passive matter moved by divine laws; after the Industrial Revolution it increasingly meant the part of reality untouched by deliberate human action. Today the word often points to wildlife and geology, or to things changing of their own accord, such as weather.
Earth is the only planet known to host life. It is third from the Sun and the largest of the rocky planets. It formed about 4.54 billion years ago from the solar nebula, and the Moon followed roughly 20 million years later. Its molten surface cooled into crust, volcanic outgassing built an early atmosphere, and life later reshaped that air into a balance that keeps surface conditions fairly stable. Tectonic plates still migrate slowly across a churning mantle above an iron core that generates a magnetic field. Continents have repeatedly merged and split; the earliest known supercontinent, Rodinia, began breaking up about 750 million years ago.
During the Neoproterozoic, ice may have covered much of the globe, a scenario called Snowball Earth, shortly before multicellular life exploded in the Cambrian roughly 530 to 540 million years ago. Five major mass extinctions have struck since, the latest about 66 million years ago, when an impact probably ended the non-avian dinosaurs.
Several million years ago a small African ape began walking upright. Its descendants, through farming and civilisation, altered the planet faster than any earlier species. The present is counted as part of the Holocene extinction, the fastest known, and E. O. Wilson of Harvard warned that human damage could eliminate half of all species within a century. Weather itself is chaotic, which is why reliable forecasts reach only a few days ahead.
Source: Nature
