12 ms·
Timeline of the Human Condition
- mikewarot 5y agoThat is an impressive list. Nitpickery - I note no entry about sea level rise ca 20000 years ago, nor the end of the Younger Dryas. Maudslay's thread cutting lathe of 1800 is also absent.
- softwaredoug 5y agoI can heartily recommend the recent season of Tides of History podcast if early human history interests you. I find it particularly fascinating how we’ve already evolved biologically due to one of our inventions (fire control)
- NoGravitas 5y agoI want to know when existential dread became a part of the human condition.
- skulk 5y agoAccording to the table, it seems that happened ~2,800,000 years ago.
- sdedovic 5y ago> “The story so far: > In the beginning the Universe was created. > This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
- tantalor 5y ago> 2006 | launch of microblogging service Twitter
- rsynnott 5y agoThousands of years ago at least, though mostly in a religious context (hells, millenarianism etc)
- FredPret 5y agoCivilization - a superorganism consisting of all of us - is growing by leaps and bounds. Hopefully it eats the whole universe one day
- spinningslate 5y ago>Hopefully it eats the whole universe one day "I really hope it doesn't" -- every individual of every non-human species everywhere else in the universe. Probably.
- FredPret 5y agoCivilization encompasses them too
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asimpletune 5y agoThis basically just a page full of spoilers for the game civilization
- lxe 5y agoI love this. The format, the brevity, the links to resources. Bookmarked. Also... would you look at that! Thousands of items, and no issues with scrolling!
- dr_kiszonka 5y agoThis is excellent! I have been looking for a timeline like this for a while. If I could submit a feature request, it would be to add some mechanism for generating more visual timelines for specific themes. For example, I wish I could create a timeline of diet-related events displayed horizontally, with the x-axis being time. Regardless, excellent content, and thanks for sharing!
- jorgeleo 5y agoVisual timeline comming up: https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- xenocyon 5y agoFor me at least, this xkcd graphic really made clear how anthropogenic climate change is truly unprecedented in the planet's history - it's the massive rate of change. And it's going to be impossible for the biosphere to adapt well to so sharp a spike.
- jabo 5y agoThe note at the end puts this timeline into calendar years, which is mind-blowing: > Rescaled to a calendar year, starting with the big bang at 00:00:00 on 1 January ( ), the Sun forms on 1 September ( ), the Earth on 2 September ( ), earliest signs of life appear on 13 September ( ), earliest true mammals on 26 December ( ), and humans just 2 hours before year’s end ( ). > For a year that starts with the earliest true mammals ( ), the dinosaurs go extinct on 17 August ( ), earliest primates appear on 9 September ( ), and humans at dawn of 25 December ( ). > For a year that starts with the earliest humans ( ), our own species appears on 19 November ( ), the first built constructions on 8 December ( ), and agricultural farming begins at midday on 29 December ( ).
- Moodles 5y agoThis was beautifully illustrated by Carl Sagan in Cosmos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20 And humans tame fire at 11:46pm on December 31st. Every 0.2 seconds is a human lifetime. And all recorded history is just a few seconds. That's every person you've ever heard of, in the last ten seconds. Truly humbling.
- bschne 5y agoStarted reading Smil‘s „Energy and Civilization“ recently and the sense of acceleration as you enter the last two centuries is almost palpable, absolutely mind-boggling once you start noticing it. As an aside, IIRC there‘s a „timeline of the universe“ on the outside of a spiral ramp at NYC‘s museum of natural history that does a similarly good job at driving this home.
- rapnie 5y ago"Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time" is also quite mindblowing and impressive. https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- dredmorbius 5y agoA very strong second on this recommendation. Recognising the absolutely definitive role of energy on progress and history is a critically important advance in understanding mechanisms of history.
- petargyurov 5y agoThis is awesome. I've been wanting to make an illustrated all-time timeline infographic that doesn't use AD/BC nonsense. I think I'll use this as a starting point!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- acdanger 5y agoWhat would you use instead?
- avgcorrection 5y agoI.e. a tragedy.
- wolverine876 5y ago'A comedy for those that think, a tragedy for those that feel.'
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gjsman-1000 5y agoHopefully that Carbon Dating is accurate. A minor flaw would turn the entire timeline upside-down.
- rsynnott 5y agoThe older stuff largely isn’t carbon dating; other isotopes are lower resolution but more useful in very long timescales.
- tondi 5y agoInterestingly, accounting the duration and density of events: Empires and conquests - 3000 years, Industrial Revolution - 300, Scientific Revolution - 200, Technological Revolution - 50 Every year we go through as much as 4x events than in 1945, and as much as 60 medieval years (!) squished in one year.
- hexxagone 5y agoNo mention of Louis Pasteur ? Odd.
- airstrike 5y agoThis is possibly the most interesting thing I've ever read. The links littered around the page make it a near endless source of interesting ideas to read and reflect upon Thank you for sharing it
- NKosmatos 5y agoNext time you/we/me face a problem, or think that something important is troubling, have a look at this page and you'll relaize that almost everything is pointless. Pair this timeline with the biggest photo of the milky way [0] and you can wash all your troubles away :-) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26490579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26490579
- lastofthemojito 5y agoThis Wikipedia page always gives me a similar feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- wolverine876 5y agoRecently I researched a dozen or two of the events on the table, and there is a lot of uncertainty of fact, issues of definition, and interpretation involved. That doesn't mean the author is wrong, but take each date as one interpretation of many. For example, Ancient Greek, developed in ~8th or 10th century BCE (facts aren't 100% clear), is typically credited as the first phonetic alphabet, where characters represent sounds (and the only one - all others being derived from it). The OP says, > 1850: earliest alphabetic script (Proto-Sinaitic, Sinai and Egypt) They may mean something slightly different. Also an alphabet of sorts preceded Ancient Greek, maybe the one in the quote above, but lacked vowels among other things, so it depends on your definition of phonetic alphabet. That's just on example, know there are many ambiguities of definition, fact, and interpretation.
- csomar 5y ago> as the first phonetic alphabet I thought the Phoenician are credited for the alphabet. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_language > The Phoenician alphabet was spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
- wolverine876 5y agoThat was the precursor without vowels, IIRC. In my very limited experience, more experts seem to say the Greek alphabet was the first that qualified as such. But really, 'who was first' is a matter of definition, of course.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- erhk 5y agoMuch of homo erectus is similarly debated but OP treats factually
- pphysch 5y agoYeah, there is a strong cultural bias here. "Timeline of the Human Condition according to one Westerner's interpretation of a couple Western encyclopedias"
- wolverine876 5y agoThese tables and charts are filled with events, but remember that for almost all of history, nothing happened. Billions of years and effectively nada. Even if you lived during the Cambrian Explosion, I doubt you would notice anything happening. .... If you want an up-to-date, authoritative, useful guide to geological history, you want the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. I'm impressed that this is kept updated and is so well done. https://stratigraphy.org/chart https://stratigraphy.org/chart
- lindseymysse 5y ago"but remember that for almost all of history, nothing happened" This seems like a anthropocentric view of the world. Planets moved immense distances, there were generation after generation of bacteria, mountains rose up and crumbled, seas were made and disappeared again. A lot happened before we showed up. A lot will happen after we're gone, also.
- DrStormyDaniels 5y ago"This seems like an anthropocentric view of the world." - What else would you suggest? The world itself, taken on its own terms, has no history, no memory of itself, no experience of time, or change, it simply is, and in that sense, simply is not. It only has a history to us.
- lindseymysse 5y agoSo, history is an illusion. Fair enough.
- DrStormyDaniels 5y agoDo you take yourself to be an illusion?
- robbedpeter 5y agoHistory is a construct. It's a product of actual physical processes in the electrical and chemical networks of human minds resulting in the rearrangement of atoms elsewhere in the universe into patterns that self replicate, or spawn processes in other networks, using any interface available. History used the medium of vibrating air, then worked its way through different symbolic systems until we landed here, at the pinnacle of human achievement, arguing on the internet. Humans are special because our constructs are orders of magnitude more complex than anything that came before. Opposable thumbs and large wrinkled brains and a lottery ticket combination of environmental factors allowed us to happen. We're a fundamentally different type of thing than anything that we know of that came before. It isn't an anthropomorphic conceit, it's a matter of physical evidence and computational theory. Nothing else does what human brains do. It's a little silly to dismiss it as somehow not real. It's as real as fusion producing light from the core of a sun, or pulsars blazing with energies that outshine entire galaxies.
- endisneigh 5y agoWhat do people think the last thing on this would be (for human condition, but not for Earth)?
- kuprel 5y agoReplacement by AI or aliens
- calsy 5y agoAliens wouldn't be interested in an already populated, resource depleted, polluted planet. Better choices available for those who can traverse space.
- bpodgursky 5y agoIt is silly to have any degree of confidence in what advanced aliens would want.
- katabasis 5y agoHuman-caused climate change creates feedback loops leading to mass extinction events, eventually making the planet unsuitable for complex life.
- scollet 5y agoI think humans would evolve in a variety of ways to transcend humanity.
- richardatlarge 5y agoThat’s awfully optimistic. Humans evolved out of nature and into culture— and culture is only a millisecond old on the evolutionary timeline. All evidence points against a Star Trek future and instead a future of perpetual dismal decline. As climate change shows, humans may be clever as individuals but they can’t even compare to ants as an intelligent collective species
- diplodocusaur 5y agoI wonder how human history changes if you change the order of discovery of inventions
- leishulang 5y agobig bang at 13 billion years ago and life on earth started 4 billion years ago. We can't honestly believe earth the only life planet.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mrwnmonm 5y agoAnyone knows how exactly scientists calculate the first number for example? What does a year mean at that point?
- nichohel 5y agoWell done, but politically charged. For example, why don't we see an item like "Human activity causes general climate warming trend but all-cause climate-related deaths (flood, drought, extreme temperatures) continue massive trend downward"? https://ourworldindata.org/ofdacred-international-disaster-data https://ourworldindata.org/ofdacred-international-disaster-d... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_related_deaths/index.html https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_r... edit: fixed link
- betwixthewires 5y agoNot just politically charged, ideologically charged. Reference to US declaration of independence leading to US superstate, but no mention of it's role in spreading the concept of individual rights worldwide. Reference to "the Wealth of Nations" in negative context, whereas Emmanuel Kant in positive context and in particular, Malthus with his since-demonstrated-to-be-glaring-absurdity in a positive light, complete with an excuse as to why it is still not invalid. It's an interesting thing, but it would be better if that sort of personal bias were left out of something attempting to be a canonical summary of the history of humankind.
- mhh__ 5y agoPotentially causing massive new crises is different to technologically progressing beyond existing ones is apples to oranges imo
- e0m 5y agoEach item is 33px tall, which on my screen, and for the sake of easy math, is ~1cm. If every year got 1 row, and we were on a linear instead of a logarithmic-ish timescale, the start of section 1 (4.1 billion years ago), would be about 41,000km tall, which is slightly bigger than the circumference of the eath. 13.813 billion years at this scale, at 138,130km, is just over a third of the way to the moon.
- thangalin 5y agoI wrote a shorter version and enlisted scientific illustrators to draw some pictures: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf Here are the sources used to craft the book: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
- randomdrake 5y agoThis is neat. Dig the illustrations. Would love to see a kid’s version of this.
- ekianjo 5y ago> Choices Burning fossil fuels has put life on Earth in peril; our children face an immense carbon dioxide cleanup, devastating climate changes, or both. We can curtail the most catastrophic outcomes, but time to do so grows alarmingly brief. If we choose air conditioner and refrigerator coolants based on hydrocarbon refrigerants; if we urge politicians to invest in on-shore wind turbines; if we reduce food waste; if we eat less meat; and if we support restoration of tropical forests... If we take these actions, there is hope. You nicely avoided Nuclear Power which is the real game changer if you want to produce energy at scale with very little CO2.
- spurgu 5y agoYup. Another issue is that there are still many things we cannot do with electricity alone, for example steel production, which accounts for 7-9% of CO2 emissions.
- pkrumins 5y agoThat's super nice! Quick question - what does the "13,813 ± 58 Ma" mean below every title? Is that some kind of time measurement from the Big Bang?
- thangalin 5y agoMa means mega annum, or millions of years. That's roughly when the event took place, relative to today. The line is a timeline from the time the universe inflated until present day. The orange dot is a visual depiction of where the event occurred along the timeline.
- marcus_holmes 5y agoIn an earlier discussion around early human technology and how we dismiss early human achievements, I pointed out that Australian Aborigines had advanced boats that enabled them to get to Australia 50,000 years ago. Yet, still, we see no mention of that here, and the technology achievements listed here for that period are needles and "advanced fire-making materials" (flints and special rocks). I'm not saying this timeline is wrong, but it does seem to adhere to a western-oriented view where there is a steady progression from primitive to modern, ignoring the many other societies who advanced in different ways.
- fit2rule 5y agoThe story is still being written about Australian pre-history. The discoveries at Narwala Gabarnmang and Gobeke Tepli require a radical re-evaluaton of the spread and nature of human civilisation, in my opinion.
- sien 5y agoSearch for Australia. There is now: "rapid colonisation of Australia by humans during 5,000 years, transecting the continent along superhighways (ancient Sahul): maritime exploration"
- beachy 5y agoAtmospheric CO2 has increased by almost a third since I was born. I can't imagine what my children and grandchildren will experience at this rate of destruction. "Agent Smith: Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus."
- erhk 5y agoYeah, and most plants and bacteria and any life that is capable really. Adaption is not uniquely human, we are simply the first to accomplish it without speciation
- svdr 5y agoAnd for what's to come: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- soheil 5y ago> 2900 accurate prediction of lunar eclipses (Germany) There was a Germany 2900 years ago?
- dghf 5y agoThey've got to call the place something. What name do you suggest? Germania is attested no later than 98 AD (in Tacitus's book of the same name). They could have gone with central Europe, I guess, but that's vaguer and still arguably anachronistic, as its use as a geographical term (as opposed to the mythological princess) isn't recorded until c. 500 BC.
- soheil 5y agoI just think it’s confusing to relate it to the country of Germany or its people when in fact it has nothing to do with it. Whereas if you call something India from 500 BC it very much has to do with modern India and its people.
- akomtu 5y agoSuch large timespans are better measured in galactic years [1] and Earth axial precession periods [2] which is 26,000 years or 1/10,000 of a galactic year. With these measures, the Milky Way was "born" about 49 galactic years ago and will "die" in 49 galactic years, so we are almost precisely in the middle. It's an interesting coincidence, that on this scale, eukaryotes appeared 6.666 galactic years ago (from [1]). [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_year [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession
- fnord77 5y agowhat sustainability revolution? if anything unsustainability is spiraling
- dredmorbius 5y agoIf you'd like a slightly more detailed, but still-manageable version of this, I strongly recommend David Christian's Big History. It's the story of history, from the Big Bang to the present. Wikipedia overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History Book (one of many): https://www.worldcat.org/title/origin-story-a-big-history-of-everything/oclc/1051081398 https://www.worldcat.org/title/origin-story-a-big-history-of... There was at one time a lecture series running about 30--40 episodes on YouTube, though I don't find that presently. There are still numerous matching hits on YouTube for "Big History" "David Christian", though I've not explored them for matches. Shorter overviews by Christian exist, including his TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs Several people have mentioned Vaclav Smil. His 1995 Energy in World History and 2017 Energy and Civilization cover the past 100,000 or 10,000 years of the history shown in TFA, largely looking at history through the lens of energy. It's a fascinating story. https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/469280610 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/... https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-history/oclc/1178979700 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
- mensetmanusman 5y ago600 million years of archea bouncing around. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that time.
- sneak 5y agoNot on the list: Species-wide abolition of slavery Species-wide abolition of torture
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cema 5y agoHas not yet happened.
- ekianjo 5y agoThese timelines are always amusing since there's a lot more entries in recent years than older periods. As if we knew what is going to be significant 1000 years from now. Hubris.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere is a recency bias. But there's also an absolutely undeniable acceleration in physical and other quantifiable bases (knowledge, understanding, population, global impacts, energy utilisation, raw materials consumption, pollution) through time. For Earth, the very rapid emergence of life (within the first few hundred million years), and then the lack of extensive complexity emerging for another 3 billion years, until the Cambrian explosion, is especially notable. Looking from the present backwards, what strikes me isn't that "the singularity" hasn't happened, but that we've seen multiple singularities, building on one another (with occasional back-tracking).
- bloak 5y agoWhen I read about the history of science I get the impression that almost everything of interest happened between about 1860 and about 1960. Since then there has been continuous quantitive progress in some areas, such as "Moore's Law", but qualitatively nothing to compare with what happened in the period 1860-1960. It's subjective, of course. Maybe I'm just old and nostalgic.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's some truth to that, though I'd push the date back a bit, perhaps to Newton or Kepler, when the logjam of appealing to the authority of the ancients (generally Aristotle) was finally and decisively broken. Vaclav Smil (already mentioned several times in this thread) points to the half-century from 1875--1925 as the peak of invention, and more specifically, the decade of the 1880s. This was the time when discoveries based on electricity, coal-tar chemistry, petroleum, some bits of genetics, and others were coming into the fore. There are very few modern inventions which cannot be traced to this period. (Radio, TV, lasers, microwaves, and genetic engineering are the main exceptions). I see this as a landmark breakthrough in both knowledge and means, the latter largely supplied through the vast untapped energy of fossil fuels. (Aknowledging their impact and declaring them an unqualified good are two entirely different matters. Yes, they changed our world and made modernity possible. Yes, they will destory that as well if we keep using them, and even if we want to, they will ultimately be exhausted.) There are a few laws of progress. Moore's refers specifically to network and size effects, and has some foundation in business practices and goals (that is, what we see as "Moore's law" phenomenon is in part driven by the performance and product targets and timelines of firms in the sector). There's also Wright's Law, which refers to the level of improvement seen with additional experience. If memory serves, about a 20% efficiency gain with each doubling of output. (This was noted especially in the US with military output during WWII, especially in the rate of aircraft and ship manufacture.) There are also scaling laws which refer to the reduction of defects, increases in precision or accuracy, and reduction of downtime. Here, each additional "nine" of performance tends to cost 10x the previous --- a case of rapidly diminishing returns. On the progress of science, I've only looked into this casually and haven't found a good or suitable measure (itself a fairly deep question --- typical metrics such as patents filed have ... ginormous fucking issues, as a term of art...). But looking at Nobel Prize awards in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, what we tend to see is highly foundational discoveries prior to about 1960, and remarkably less so afterwards. In all three cases, I also note a strong presence of detection and measurement discoveries in the post-1960 era, which is to say, discoveries that increase our ability to detect various phenomena, as in remote astronomical measurements, chemical detection, or looking at body or cellular processes. Physics seems especially notable, with the pre-1960 period seeing numerous particles, forces, and principles (quantum mechanics, relativistic effects (but not the Theory of Relativity itself), and basic phenomena such as radiation). I've got thoughts on that, you might try looking up my past threads on "ontology of technology" --- these are informational mechanisms. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20technology%20ontology&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- exolymph 5y agoThank you, ancestors, for accomplishing all that you did. My life is so much easier due to your striving and sacrifices. Rest easy dear ones.
- Proven 5y ago[dead]
- generationP 5y ago> 2019 first global climate strike (20/9/2019), led by school children and joined by millions of people with justified concerns → world scientists warn of a climate emergency I guess they were right about terminal boredom.
- andretti1977 5y ago> 25000 bce: a coronavirus epidemic sweeps through East Asia, driving genetic adaptations still present in modern humans Ah! Really interesting!
- erhk 5y agoYes well there have been many modern coronaviruses as well. The naming of nCov19 is intended to communicate thats this is a recent novel coronavirus first seen in 2019
- nonlincoder 5y agoDoesn't say anything about my birth :)
- ricardo81 5y agoThis kind of thing triggers me to play Civ... wrt climate, this is a bit more pop science but illustrates something similar for the recent centuries. https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
- rawoke083600 5y agoThis is basically a "stack-trace" of the matrix-program we call the world/universe/home :P
- asiachick 5y ago100s of millions of years apart but 5 mass extinctions. * 445,000,000 mass extinction in two pulses across 1 million years, eliminating more than three-quarters of all species (Late Ordovician), linked to volcanic activity * 375,000,000 mass extinction in a series of pulses across 20 million years, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Late Devonian), linked to climatic cooling * 251,900,000 Earth’s largest mass extinction, eliminating nine tenths of all species during 61 thousand years (Permian-Triassic transition), caused by hot and acidifying volcanic CO₂ emissions * 201,300,000 mass extinction event, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Triassic-Jurassic transition), linked to volcanic CO₂ equivalent to projections for CE 21ˢᵗ century anthropogenic emissions * 66,000,000 abrupt mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of all species, following a 9-km wide asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico (Cretaceous-Paleogene transition) → rapid diversification of flowering plants and mammals
- xtiansimon 5y agoThe realization of time and the capacity of visualization — There is a wonderful book showcasing an exhibit at the Montreal Museum of art. I guess you could say this exhibit’s thesis is to talk about the effect of photography in culture to take what is numinous about nature (vast beyond measure) and to make it concrete and visible. Similarly the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment changed culture. As I recall it was Keates who lamented Newton for ruining poetry. Cosmos : From Romanticism to Avant-Garde, 1801-2001 By Clair, Jean (Editor) ISBN 10: 3791320890