If we look to the past, it is possible to see just how far the world has come and how much the world has changed. Some of it for good and some of it for ill. To begin with though, there are some incredibly startling facts about our world and the time we’ve spent in it both individually and collectively as a species that really put things into a larger context.
For example, did you know the last execution by guillotine in France occurred on 10th September 1977? Not only were a lot of you alive at that time, but this is after the release of the first Star Wars film (now known as Episode 4: A New Hope) which came to cinemas on 25th May 1977. This is time in a context we can all understand because it’s within one lifetime.
In a similar vein but looking a gaps of a few lifetimes, Oxford University (UK) was founded in the year 1096, a full 332 years BEFORE the Aztec Empire was even founded. The Aztec Empire was destroyed in 1521 by Hernan Cortez just 254 years before the American Revolutionary War began. We live closer to the end of the American Revolutionary War than the founding fathers lived to the destruction of the Aztec Empire, by about 15 years. They (the founding fathers) lived much closer to the time of the Aztecs than the Aztecs did to the founding of Oxford University.
Do we want to go much more extreme? Lets take our last human step, and consider that Jesus lived roughly 2,000 years ago – a very long time ago by anybody’s standards. By then though, the great pyramids in Egypt were already much older for him than he is for us – they were created roughly 3,000 years before Jesus was born. Humans built structures that have lasted for 5,000 years and did it without electricity or even a mathematical understanding of gravity and we still don’t fully understand how these structures were created because there are no surviving records from this time or earlier.
However, we know lots of things about the existence of historical creatures from carbon dating. We know that the dinosaurs first appeared approximately 225 million years ago, a span of time so enormous that the human mind has no chance of really contemplating it. But we do know that dinosaurs disappeared around 65 million years ago, and humans CAN understand intuitively the difference between 225 and 65 – it’s 160. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years. We live much closer to the time of the Tyrannosaurus Rex than T. Rex did to the time of the sauropods, the largest land animals to ever exist. Do you feel like going further? Lets go a little bit further…
Around 600 million years ago, the first multicellular organisms evolved – an ENORMOUS step in biological history without which we simply wouldn’t exist. In 400 million years, life went from a single cell to dinosaurs, and 200 million years later, humans with (what human’s call) intelligence have evolved and taken a hand in creating the world around us today. Can we go any further back? I thought you’d never ask.
In the context we’re now considering, the frankly mind-boggling period of time of 600 million years is starting to become inconsequential. 600 million years took life on earth from single celled organisms to the huge array of plants and animals that we see in the world today. How long did it take to get from one cell to two cells in a single organism? It takes human cells 30 hours on average to divide from a single fertilised egg into two cells, and a further 15 hours to divide again. You’d be forgiven then for thinking that the first cells did it in a similar time scale, maybe a bit longer. You would be oh so very wrong. It took somewhere between 2.5 and 3 BILLION years for single celled organisms to become multicellular. Three thousand million years…
Life has existed on the planet earth for between approximately 3 and 3.5 billion years, and over 80% of that time, life consisted of just single celled organisms and it took in the region of 1 billion years for life to appear on earth. Even so, life has existed on the planet earth for approximately ¾ of earths existence and the earth has only existed for around a third of the current lifespan of the universe. So that’s a real whistle-stop tour of time scales in our universe.
It obviously feels like humans have been around for a long time, because in human terms we have been. However, as described above, we haven’t been here long in the grand scheme of things. So how long have we been here really? Let us imagine a calendar charting the entire history of the universe from The Big Bang, to now. It might look something like this:
On this scale, The Big Bang happened at the very start of the calendar, 00:00:00 on 1 January. The earth didn’t form until 6 September, with life appearing on 21 September. The first multicellular life didn’t appear until 7 December. Dinosaurs appeared on 25 December and died out at 06:24 on 30 December.
Humans invented stone tools on 31 December at 22:24 and didn’t become anatomically modern humans until 31 December at 23:52. The building of Stonehenge and the earliest recorded proto-writing occurred on 31 December at 23:59:47 with the birth of Christianity occurring 8 seconds later.
The last second of the last minute of the last hour of the last day of cosmic calendar year covers everything from roughly the last 450 years. Queen Elizabeth 1st was on the throne of England, William Shakespeare was busy writing and Isaac Newton was yet to arrive on stage. Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, working theories of light and gravity AND calculus. On this scale, just 1 second ago, none of this existed. And this, this is where you and I reside. Assuming you’re under the age of 45, you, like me, were born in the last tenth of the last second of December 31st on the Cosmic Calendar.
That’s a lot of perspective, and I know that you’re wondering how it can help. But that’s why we’re here – this Part One gives the perspective and the subsequent installations will explore and explain WHY this perspective is useful.