5 ms·
The 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 J
by jabo 5y ago
The 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.
- xapata 5y agoWhoever made that NYC museum ramp really loved quasars. She probably wrote her doctorate thesis about quasars.
- chasil 5y agoThis will outlast us, beyond comprehension. Proton decay, and the death of everything that we can know, is just the beginning. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
- armchairhacker 5y agoThis is still very long compared to our size vs the size of the universe though. There are an estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies with billions of stars, and they are all very spaced out too. Most stars are significantly bigger than our planet, and our planet can fit over 7.5 billion humans with a lot of extra space. There are 8760 hours in a year, so according to the above humans have existed around 1/4380 of the time the universe has. Meanwhile idk the exact amount but we occupy less than 1/1,000,000,000,000 of the space of the universe.
- syntaxfree 5y agoI had a beautiful poster of this as a child.
- tim333 5y agoOn that scale HN has existed for about 30ms and us for a few times longer. Maybe singularity type stuff will allow us to hang out a while longer. Physics type evolution of stars and plants -> biological evolution of lifeforms reproducing and dying -> AI evolution of our mind children as it were.