I was reading Jurassic
Park the other day, and it mentions at one point that most people find
it hard enough to imagine historical events that took place hundreds or
even thousands of years ago, but that’s small potatoes in comparison to
the millions of years that palaeontologists and geologists deal in. So
I’ve decided to provide you with a little demonstration of just how big
a difference that is, and how insignificant human history is in the
grand scheme of things.
The Earth is a staggering 4·54 billion
years old. Let’s imagine that vast time span in the space of one year.
That means each day of the year represents about 12·44 million years.
So the Earth was formed on the stroke of midnight that marked January 1st, and away we go! :)
Now,
the earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth – simple,
single-celled organisms – dates from about three billion years ago. On
our timeline, that’s somewhere around 7.30 PM (give or take a few minutes) on May 4th. There was a lot of
geological chaos going on in those first four months, but we’re not
here to detail the entire history of the planet: just a few of the
most interesting evolutionary landmarks.
Now, life may have
existed since May 4th, but it’s not until November 15th, around 8.53
AM, that we get the first multicellular animals! (That’s 580 million
years.)
And it’s only at around 9.21 AM on November 19th (530 million years ago) that we find creatures with backbones.
Up
to now, all life has existed only in the sea. A select few creatures
along the way were able to leave the sea and venture onto dry land, but
it’s not until December that we find the land well and truly colonised.
This happened in the Late Devonian period, between 385 and 359 million
years ago, so that’s no earlier than 1.08 AM on December 1st on our
timeline.
So what about the dinosaurs? I’m sure that’s one you
all want to know about. :) Well, the dinosaurs only appeared at around
11.08 AM on December 12th. (The earliest known dinosaur, Nyasasaurus,
dates from about 243 million years ago.)
And the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, was at about 6.35 PM on December 26th.
And
as for humans, modern man… well, only the last 23 minutes of this
entire year represents their (or perhaps I should say our) reign of
about 200,000 years.
And now, just to finish up, let’s throw in a
frame of reference that might be more recognisable to you. The birth of
Christ, say. Well, out of this whole year, the 2015 AD years only
represent the last fourteen seconds!
Compared to this, an average human lifetime of seventy-five years is (are you ready for this?) 0·52 seconds. Blink and you’d miss it!
So
there you go. Human history of five thousand years or so may seem like
a very long time to us, but compared to geological time, it’s beyond
negligible.
