Soon, another decade will come to a close. Sunrise. Sunset. All that stuff.
Anyway, our lives take place in a very short-term, here-and-now context, so it’s useful to revisit time with an eye toward the long-view of things. It helps me keep things in perspective. Plus, we appreciate so little of the universe in our day to day lives that I enjoy gawking at its unimaginably huge scope. Where possible, I push the big numbers aside. Assuming you aren’t an astrophysics buff or a math whiz, those really big numbers make the mind go fuzzy.
For me, it’s about proportions. Avoid the numbers and things are a bit more understandable. When it comes to that, Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar (which I previously pointed at) is the go-to tool. It uses a measure that we’re all familiar with to get the point across. Context is key and this tool, while beaten to death by this point, is still very useful.
- The Cosmic Calendar is a conceptual tool popularized by the late Carl Sagan. Imagine that all of history could be mapped against a large wall calendar in a single year. If the Big Bang took place on January 1st at midnight and today’s date and time is December 31 at midnight, then all of human history has taken place within the last minute of the last day of the last month. Against this backdrop, we are quite young.
To those of a particular religious bent, Richard Dawkins 
can appear as a kind of fanatical atheist. But, it makes sense to me that someone possessed of a love of evolutionary life would be a bit irritated by fundamentalism. Anyway, he cleverly used a piano to illustrate the the emergence of life on earth.
Much of our civilization is still wrestling with the integration of evolution into our culture. It’s not an easy task when all that we are goes from really big to really small. Our ego is wounded and I get that. Sure, our religious traditions make this an uncomfortable lump to swallow, but these impossibly large numbers – billions and billions – play their part. Nothing in our evolutionary history prepared us for pondering the apparent weirdness of existence.
If you really want to dig deeper, there’s a great tool that allows you to move a slider along a range and see just what evolved and when. It’s a Flash-based tool, so it’s showing its age, but it’s still excellent. And, while it uses those big numbers I want to avoid, it provides enough detail so that you can mostly ignore them. I particularly like that it attempts to map the evolution of the elements. We’re all accustomed to the notion that biological life becomes increasingly complex, but not so much hydrogen and argon.
Click here to open up this teriffic - and quite dense - tool for visualizing the evolution of the universe.
I’ve always loved science fiction. But, no matter what bizarro, phoney baloney timeline of the human future I encounter, nothing is weirder than what’s already happened. I suppose that’s why Dawkins – and so many of us – get frustrated with the two-dimensional children’s stories that pass themselves off as the ultimate answer. Scientists don’t want the universe to appear as it does. It’s untidy and confusing. But, observations are observations; to hell with what we want.
While woefully incomplete, the picture science is drawing up is strange and wonderful. I’ll continue to be on the lookout for useful ways to convey this stuff. Around the time my son is in high school, I should have one hell of a collection amassed. If you have something to add, please do so.
