If you could have looked up at the sky 4 billion years ago, you would have seen a sun much dimmer than ours today. And if you looked down at the Earth’s oceans, you would have seen an expanse of bobbing waves.

That’s a problem–a simple one, but a big one. And scientists have been wrestling with it for fifty years.

The evidence for these two facts about the early Earth–a dim sun and liquid oceans–were already strong in the 1960s. Astronomers have compared our sun today to other stars of different sizes and ages, and they’ve been able to reconstruct much of its history. The sun started out about 70% as bright as today. It slowly grew brighter; even two billion