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 ( ).
Started 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.
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.
This 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.
On 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.
> 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.
Yup. 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.
Thank you for sharing this. This reminded of an amazing exhibit I saw in Tokyo, at the National Museum of Nature and Science. I don't have much to add, I just wanted to thank you, it was a very enjoyable read.
Ma 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.
These 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.
"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.
We are talking about two different things. I don't mean that there weren't any football games and thus nothing interesting happened.
If you look at a timeline, you might see:
- 3.5 bya: First prokaryote
- 2.5 bya: FIrst eukaryote
- 0.6 bya: Cambrian explosion
- 0.44 bya: First terrestrial life
All the text you see is about change. But 99.99999...% of that time, there is no such event. We write about and think about the changes, not the vast eons when nothing changes (except excruciatingly gradually). After the Cambrian Explosion, trilobytes multiplied and took over the world, but that was (I'm guessing) over millions years; if you were there, you wouldn't see a vast herd (school?) of them advancing across the landscape one day. Short of a few big extinction events (at least the K/T that killed the dinosaurs), I don't think you would notice any such change at all if you lived at any time in history. But now I'm thinking about whether one of those events could be sudden and dramatic.
"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.
Recently 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.
That 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.
Yeah, there is a strong cultural bias here. "Timeline of the Human Condition according to one Westerner's interpretation of a couple Western encyclopedias"
In 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.
Each 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.
This 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!
For 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.
Readit News
> 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 ( ).
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
Recognising the absolutely definitive role of energy on progress and history is a critically important advance in understanding mechanisms of history.
Proton decay, and the death of everything that we can know, is just the beginning.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
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.
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.
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.
https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
Here are the sources used to craft the book:
https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf
You nicely avoided Nuclear Power which is the real game changer if you want to produce energy at scale with very little CO2.
....
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
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.
If you look at a timeline, you might see:
All the text you see is about change. But 99.99999...% of that time, there is no such event. We write about and think about the changes, not the vast eons when nothing changes (except excruciatingly gradually). After the Cambrian Explosion, trilobytes multiplied and took over the world, but that was (I'm guessing) over millions years; if you were there, you wouldn't see a vast herd (school?) of them advancing across the landscape one day. Short of a few big extinction events (at least the K/T that killed the dinosaurs), I don't think you would notice any such change at all if you lived at any time in history. But now I'm thinking about whether one of those events could be sudden and dramatic.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.
I thought the Phoenician are credited for the alphabet. From 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.
"rapid colonisation of Australia by humans during 5,000 years, transecting the continent along superhighways (ancient Sahul): maritime exploration"
Dead Comment
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.
Also... would you look at that! Thousands of items, and no issues with scrolling!
Is this taking a dig at React? If so, good one
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!
https://xkcd.com/1732/