How can we make sense of the history of our universe that we have learned through science? How can we fathom the depths of time involved? The mind boggles when we hear about millions or billions of years. We can't comprehend.
The Cosmic Timeline invites us to imagine the entire history of the universe mapped onto a single year. We may not truly understand millions and billions of years, but we all know what a single year feels like. This Cosmic Timeline can help us leverage that understanding to begin to comprehend the depths of time since the beginning of the universe.
It also tells us our story along the way. From the Big Bang at the stroke of midnight on January 1st all the way to the present day during the last second at the end of December 31st, the Cosmic Timeline can help us understand the sequence and proportion of events and gives us a better perspective on our place in the history of the cosmos.
13 700 000 000 The Big Bang creates matter, time, and space.
13 699 620 000 The universe goes dark as protons capture free electrons to form hydrogen. The universe finally becomes transparent and frees the energy pent up since the Big Bang, creating a burst of light and energy that we detect as the cosmic microwave background.
13 300 000 000 Matter begins to clump together in the deep darkness. Pulled together by gravity, clouds of hydrogen and helium condense to form galaxies and stars. Their stellar furnaces shed new light on the gloomy cosmos.
13 200 000 000 The oldest known star in the Milky Way is born. The oldest known galaxy is at least this old.
12 930 000 000 The oldest known quasar is at least this old. The brigtest objects in the universe, quasars are probably supermassive black holes ripping stars apart and gobbling up what remains.
12 700 000 000 The process of star formation is in full swing. Early stars create the heavy materials necessary for life (e.g. carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen) in the alchemical furnaces in their cores. When they die, the cataclysmic explosions of their deaths will broadcast the seeds of future life across the universe. Future generations of stars will take up these materials, create their own, and pass this cosmic heritage down in their turn.
12 000 000 000 The oldest water found surrounds the black hole of a distant quasar. There is enough water vapor in the cloud to fill the Earth's current oceans 140 trillion times.
8 800 000 000 The thin disk of stars, gas, and dust that surrounds the core of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, forms.
4 570 000 000 The explosion of our Mother Supernova creates shock waves in an insterstellar cloud of gas and dust. This cloud gets denser and denser until it reaches the point that nuclear fusion begins, and our Sun is born.
4 540 000 000 The Earth and other planets are born in a ring of material that surrounds the Sun.
4 340 000 000 The Sun and its planets complete one orbit around the galactic center since the Sun was formed.
4 527 000 000 The Moon is formed in a collision between Earth and Theia.
4 100 000 000 Jupiter and Saturn reach an orbital resonance which disrupts the outer solar system and bombards the inner solar system with comets (Late Heavy Bombardment).
3 800 000 000 The bombardment of the inner solar system ends, allowing the Earth to form a solid crust. The earliest cellular life is born from lifeless materials on the newly quiescent Earth.
3 400 000 000 Some microbes evolve the ability to draw energy from sunlight in a process called photosynthesis.
2 400 000 000 Oxygen builds up in the atmosphere, poisoning most life on Earth and causing an ice age that will shroud the Earth in ice and snow for hundreds of millions of years (Huronian Glaciation).
2 270 000 000 The Sun and its planets complete their tenth orbit around the galactic center since the Sun was formed.
2 100 000 000 The Huronian ice age caused by the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere comes to an end.
1 000 000 000 Last volcanic eruptions on the Moon.
665 000 000 Animals
641 000 000 Arthropods
525 000 000 Vertebrates
520 000 000 Fish
450 000 000 Land plants (e.g. lichens, mosses, and liverworts)
420 000 000 Insects
400 000 000 Ferns; atmospheric oxygen reaches minimum level necessary to sustain human life.
390 000 000 Seeds
360 000 000 Amphibians
305 000 000 Reptiles
251 000 000 Mass extinction of 95% of marine species, 70% of land vertebrates, and the only known mass extinction of insects.
215 000 000 Mammals
150 000 000 Birds
130 000 000 Flowering plants
75 000 000 Primates
65 500 000 Meteor collides with Earth, causing a mass extinction killing off all non-avian dinosaurs and initiating the dominance of mammals.
6 000 000 Last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees
4 500 000 Human bipedalism
2 600 000 Humans create stone tools
800 000 Humans domesticate fire
200 000 Anatomically modern humans
11 700 The Holocene Epoch (shown as the thin red line at the bottom of the timeline) is heralded by the glaciers receding for the last time before today. Humans learn to grow crops and animals instead of hunting and gathering. Human civilization arises. Humans learn to keep a record of their thoughts using abstract symbols: writing. They learn over time to extract and harness the properties of copper, bronze, and iron. They invent the printing press. They create the Industrial Revolution, electronic computing machines, and nuclear weapons. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, a living organism leaves its home planet and travels to the Moon.
This timeline is 400 meters (450 yards) tall, taller than the Empire State Building! If you had the silly (and wasteful) notion to print it, it would cover more than 1500 pages. As you flipped through the pages, you would find all of recorded human history represented by a hardly noticeable red sliver at the very end of the last page.
So why is this timeline so long? It had to be. To show the tiny speck of time since the last ice age, even as just a thin red line at the bottom, this timeline had to be extremely long. It is as short as it could be and no shorter. If it were any shorter, all of recorded human history would seem to vanish.
The span of our lives is imperceptible at this scale. If we wanted to show the average lifespan of a modern human on a similar timeline, the expanded timeline would be 100–150 times taller, more than twice as high as most commercial aircraft fly.
In the grand scheme of things, humans have come on the scene only the last few moments, and each human life is merely the blink of the cosmic eye.
Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Blake. All rights reserved.