That is an impressive list.
Nitpickery - I note no entry about sea level rise ca 20000 years ago, nor the end of the Younger Dryas.
Maudslay's thread cutting lathe of 1800 is also absent.
Timeline of the Human Condition
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Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#32Next time you/we/me face a problem, or think that something important is troubling, have a look at this page and you'll relaize that almost everything is pointless. Pair this timeline with the biggest photo of the milky way [0] and you can wash all your troubles away :-) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26490579
This Wikipedia page always gives me a similar feeling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#33Recently I researched a dozen or two of the events on the table, and there is a lot of uncertainty of fact, issues of definition, and interpretation involved. That doesn't mean the author is wrong, but take each date as one interpretation of many.
For example, Ancient Greek, developed in ~8th or 10th century BCE (facts aren't 100% clear), is typically credited as the first phonetic alphabet, where characters represent sounds (and the only one - all others being derived from it). The OP says,
> 1850: earliest alphabetic script (Proto-Sinaitic, Sinai and Egypt)
They may mean something slightly different. Also an alphabet of sorts preceded Ancient Greek, maybe the one in the quote above, but lacked vowels among other things, so it depends on your definition of phonetic alphabet.
That's just on example, know there are many ambiguities of definition, fact, and interpretation.
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#34These tables and charts are filled with events, but remember that for almost all of history, nothing happened. Billions of years and effectively nada. Even if you lived during the Cambrian Explosion, I doubt you would notice anything happening.
....
If you want an up-to-date, authoritative, useful guide to geological history, you want the International Chronostratigraphic Chart. I'm impressed that this is kept updated and is so well done.
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#35I.e. a tragedy.
'A comedy for those that think, a tragedy for those that feel.'
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#36What do people think the last thing on this would be (for human condition, but not for Earth)?
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#37I wonder how human history changes if you change the order of discovery of inventions
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#38The note at the end puts this timeline into calendar years, which is mind-blowing: > Rescaled to a calendar year, starting with the big bang at 00:00:00 on 1 January ( ), the Sun forms on 1 September ( ), the Earth on 2 September ( ), earliest signs of life appear on 13 September ( ), earliest true mammals on 26 December ( ), and humans just 2 hours before year’s end ( ). > For a year that starts with the earliest tr…
This is still very long compared to our size vs the size of the universe though.
There are an estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies with billions of stars, and they are all very spaced out too. Most stars are significantly bigger than our planet, and our planet can fit over 7.5 billion humans with a lot of extra space.
There are 8760 hours in a year, so according to the above humans have existed around 1/4380 of the time the universe has. Meanwhile idk the exact amount but we occupy less than 1/1,000,000,000,000 of the space of the universe.
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#39big bang at 13 billion years ago and life on earth started 4 billion years ago. We can't honestly believe earth the only life planet.
Re: Timeline of the Human Condition
#40Interestingly, accounting the duration and density of events: Empires and conquests - 3000 years, Industrial Revolution - 300, Scientific Revolution - 200, Technological Revolution - 50 Every year we go through as much as 4x events than in 1945, and as much as 60 medieval years (!) squished in one year.
I mean, there’s presumably a strong recency bias here.
Don't forget a correlating exponential growth in human population.