Quote:
Originally Posted by dark_crystal
kinda reminds me of the "Earth History Compressed Into One Year" lesson and how humans don't even appear till halfway through the last day. So our dinky little species on our dinky little solar planet in this dinky little solar system is nothing special either, really |
If there were one thing that I wish I could communicate to everyone on the planet it would be this: all that we hold dear, all that we are so rightfully impressed with ourselves for, is not even a blink of an eye in the life of the universe. To give you a sense of perspective (I have one of those history of the universe in a year posters in my home office but I'm not at home while writing this so I'm working off of memory):
If the Universe begins on January 1, the Milky Way forms in March, our Sun and the planets form in August, the earliest life shows up in September and stays single-celled until November, vertebrates and land-based plants show up around mid-December, dinosaurs show up right around Christmas eve, mammals show up Christmas day, birds show up a couple of days after that. A couple of days before the end of the year, dinosaurs disappear from the planet. Around mid-morning of the last day of the year apes (us, chimps, bonobos, orangutans) show up. Hominids hit on the trick of walking upright between 9 and 10 on the 31st. About five minutes before the end of the year anatomically (but not behaviorially) modern humans show up. With about 20 seconds left in the year, agriculture and writing are invented. With about 10 seconds left in the year, the Pyramids are built in Egypt. One second before the end of the year, Columbus sails from Spain.
The last 500 years you need an Olympic quality stopwatch in order to track the time. The last 100 years you need an atomic clock because no stopwatch is accurate to within hundreds of thousandths or millionths of a second.
I love that image because it puts us in perspective. We are a very brief species--whose tenure on this planet is only measured in tens of thousands of years--living on an ordinary rocky planet, orbiting a perfectly pedestrian yellow-dwarf star, at the outer edge of an absolutely ordinary spiral galaxy. That said, we are also the legatees of an
unbroken lineage going back to about half-a-billion years after the planet formed.
Cheers
Aj