Scale continued…

…still talking about scale here:
Alright, now let’s think about time.

The universe is known to be about 13 billion years old. (13.77 +-0.059 billion years to be exact.)
To more easily comprehend this amount of time and the things that have happened since then, let’s scale that down to 13 years instead of 13 billion years. We can all think of what we were doing 13 years ago right? Well, about 5 years ago the Earth formed. The first multi-cellular organisms would have evolved only 7 months ago.

The dinosaurs would have lived for several weeks before getting wiped out by an asteroid impact 3 weeks ago. Feel bad the dinosaurs only lived a few weeks? A few weeks = 180 million years! Actually, dinosaurs are one of the longest living, most successful animals. Consider modern humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years! So, don’t feel bad… they had a nice run. Our earliest ancestors, some of the first bi-pedal apes would have appeared about 3 days ago. Our own species? 3 minutes.

Think back to the time of Jesus. To me, that seems like an unfathomable amount of time – almost like we’re so far removed from that time period that it doesn’t seem real. On our new timescale, we’re talking about less than 2 seconds ago. In 2 seconds, we went from a desert tribal society to a space going species who have uncovered some of the Universe’s greatest mysteries! Heck, the first manned flight ever was less than 60 years before the first man in space!

The future is now my friends… we live in a great time! Make it a great weekend!! ;)


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