Spent the past two days in Catalina with Audrey, her mom, and mom’s husband. There are stories circulating that I may have let a dingy float away while grabbing a bag off the back of the boat, but I can assure everyone that it was all intentional – I just needed an excuse to dive in and chase down a rubber raft.
The Catalina trip offered tons of time to read, and I’m on to another Carl Sagan book – The Dragons of Eden, a non-fiction book about the evolution of human intelligence. At the beginning of the book he makes an attempt to give some idea of how long the time periods are when discussing evolution. To illustrate the point, he condenses all of history into one year, and then lays out the following dates:
- January 1: The Big Bang
- May 1: The Milky Way galaxy Forms
- September 9: The solar system forms
- September 14: The Earth forms
- September 25: Origin of life on Earth
- December 1: Significant oxygen atmosphere develops on Earth
- December 20: Plants begin colonization of land
- December 24: First dinosaurs
- December 26: First mammals
- December 28: First flowers, dinosaurs extinct
- December 31:
- 10:30 PM: First humans
- 11:00 PM: Widespread use of stone tools by humans
- 11:56 PM: End of the last Ice Age
- 11:59:50 PM: Beginning of Egyptian civilization
- 11:59:53 PM: Bronze Age, Trojan War
- 11:59:56 PM: Birth of Christ
- 11:59:59 PM: Rennaisance
- The first second of New Year’s Day: Present Day
It’s a pretty cool way to look at it; if it takes (relatively) just four minutes to go from the last Ice Age to the present it puts in perspective how much things can change over a much, much longer period of time.