This reminded me of something I saw at the Science Museum in London a few years ago. A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear. I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment…
There's a growing academic discipline called "Big History"[1] that attempts to examine all of history from the big bang to the present. Bill Gates sponsors a project to teach a free public course to high school students[2].
This is the first time I've seen something online that really made me go "Wow! I want to make something like this too!"
And since I felt so strongly about this reaction, I messaged the guy behind the site (Luke Twyman) saying "Thanks for the inspiration!"
It's quite a feeling being (a) inspired by something that you just bump into one day, and (b) being able to shoot the guy/gal behind it telling him/her how much you enjoyed their stuff. It's always a great feeling getting positive feedback for some of my blog articles, and I'm strangely feeling perhaps just as positive and cheery for giving such a thumbs up to someone!
Carbon dating is actually only effective up to about 50,000 years, so its really only ideal for tracking human history after we started migrating out of Africa. This is because the unstable carbon-14 isotope only has a half-life of about 5700 years. There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ag…
I'm curious how it could prove accurate for that time frame? How could something like that be verified or proven?
It's all theoretical, in the same way that our understanding of gravity or radiation itself is theoretical.
.. and here is us, destroying millions of years life, in what is a split of a second in comparison. We are undertaking the greatest mass extinction of all times.
99.99%+ of all life form that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. And it isn't because of Humans. Think about that for a second: The universe is-- gasp --actively trying to 'kill' life. For us to undertake the greatest mass extinction of all times (that is to say, rival or exceed mass extinction caused by natural causes itself on Earth), we'd have to destroy at least-- at least --another 10,000 Earth-like planets…
They are indeed extinct, but spread over that time span. The "mass" in "mass extinction" come from the fact that a much greater # than usual are going extinct at the same time. Which is the case today. You may eat one burger a day for a long time. Which adds to a lot of burgers. In fact, 99.99% of all burgers you ate. But if you ate 100 burgers in one single day, I'd say something is wrong with you. Similarly, in a mass extinction, we are killing a great number of species, in a short amount of time, by completely altering the habitat/ecology of entire regions of Earth. Darwinian extinction on the other hand is driven by being out-competed by other species exploring the problem space, and long-term geological change.
I've always wanted to do something like that! It's brilliant. You should add "here is your grand-grand mother, what's her name?" and "here will be your potential grand grand son, do you think they'll remember your name?"
Out of interest, what country are you from? I'm curious at the fact you called it 'grand-grand'. Here in Australia we use 'great grand(mother etc.)'. Must be a cultural thing.