Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Timeline of the Human Condition

southampton.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 121 posts

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#81

Post by chasil »

bschne wrote: post #18
jabo wrote: post #10

The 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…

Started reading Smil‘s „Energy and Civilization“ recently and the sense of acceleration as you enter the last two centuries is almost palpable, absolutely mind-boggling once you start noticing it. As an aside, IIRC there‘s a „timeline of the universe“ on the outside of a spiral ramp at NYC‘s museum of natural history that does a similarly good job at driving this home.

This will outlast us, beyond comprehension.

Proton decay, and the death of everything that we can know, is just the beginning.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#82

Post by richardatlarge »

scollet wrote: post #56
endisneigh wrote: post #36

What do people think the last thing on this would be (for human condition, but not for Earth)?

I think humans would evolve in a variety of ways to transcend humanity.

That’s awfully optimistic. Humans evolved out of nature and into culture— and culture is only a millisecond old on the evolutionary timeline. All evidence points against a Star Trek future and instead a future of perpetual dismal decline. As climate change shows, humans may be clever as individuals but they can’t even compare to ants as an intelligent collective species

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#83

Post by throwaway923857 »

thangalin wrote: post #50

I wrote a shorter version and enlisted scientific illustrators to draw some pictures: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf Here are the sources used to craft the book: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

Wow, the bibliography is 136 pages. Looks like a lot of work went into the book.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#85

Post by thangalin »

pkrumins wrote: post #80
thangalin wrote: post #50

I wrote a shorter version and enlisted scientific illustrators to draw some pictures: https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf Here are the sources used to craft the book: https://impacts.to/bibliography.pdf

That's super nice! Quick question - what does the "13,813 ± 58 Ma" mean below every title? Is that some kind of time measurement from the Big Bang?

Ma means mega annum, or millions of years. That's roughly when the event took place, relative to today. The line is a timeline from the time the universe inflated until present day. The orange dot is a visual depiction of where the event occurred along the timeline.

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#86

Post by sien »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #53

In an earlier discussion around early human technology and how we dismiss early human achievements, I pointed out that Australian Aborigines had advanced boats that enabled them to get to Australia 50,000 years ago. Yet, still, we see no mention of that here, and the technology achievements listed here for that period are needles and "advanced fire-making materials" (flints and special rocks). I'm not saying this tim…

Search for Australia. There is now:

"rapid colonisation of Australia by humans during 5,000 years, transecting the continent along superhighways (ancient Sahul): maritime exploration"

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#89

Post by erhk »

wolverine876 wrote: post #33

Recently 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 represen…

Much of homo erectus is similarly debated but OP treats factually

Re: Timeline of the Human Condition

#90

Post by erhk »

andretti1977 wrote: post #88

> 25000 bce: a coronavirus epidemic sweeps through East Asia, driving genetic adaptations still present in modern humans Ah! Really interesting!

Yes well there have been many modern coronaviruses as well. The naming of nCov19 is intended to communicate thats this is a recent novel coronavirus first seen in 2019
Post reply on HN