[HN Gopher] Timeline of the Human Condition ___________________________________________________________________ Timeline of the Human Condition Author : piotrgrudzien Score : 212 points Date : 2021-11-04 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.southampton.ac.uk) (TXT) w3m dump (www.southampton.ac.uk) | e0m wrote: | Each item is 33px tall, which on my screen, and for the sake of | easy math, is ~1cm. | | If every year got 1 row, and we were on a linear instead of a | logarithmic-ish timescale, the start of section 1 (4.1 billion | years ago), would be about 41,000km tall, which is slightly | bigger than the circumference of the eath. | | 13.813 billion years at this scale, at 138,130km, is just over a | third of the way to the moon. | wolverine876 wrote: | These 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. | | https://stratigraphy.org/chart | endisneigh wrote: | What do people think the last thing on this would be (for human | condition, but not for Earth)? | katabasis wrote: | Human-caused climate change creates feedback loops leading to | mass extinction events, eventually making the planet unsuitable | for complex life. | kuprel wrote: | Replacement by AI or aliens | calsy wrote: | Aliens wouldn't be interested in an already populated, | resource depleted, polluted planet. Better choices available | for those who can traverse space. | bpodgursky wrote: | It is silly to have any degree of confidence in what | advanced aliens would want. | airstrike wrote: | This is possibly the most interesting thing I've ever read. The | links littered around the page make it a near endless source of | interesting ideas to read and reflect upon | | Thank you for sharing it | diplodocusaur wrote: | I wonder how human history changes if you change the order of | discovery of inventions | gjsman-1000 wrote: | Hopefully that Carbon Dating is accurate. A minor flaw would turn | the entire timeline upside-down. | rsynnott wrote: | The older stuff largely isn't carbon dating; other isotopes are | lower resolution but more useful in very long timescales. | mrwnmonm wrote: | Anyone knows how exactly scientists calculate the first number | for example? What does a year mean at that point? | marcus_holmes wrote: | 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 timeline is wrong, but it | does seem to adhere to a western-oriented view where there is a | steady progression from primitive to modern, ignoring the many | other societies who advanced in different ways. | leishulang wrote: | big 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. | [deleted] | lxe wrote: | I love this. The format, the brevity, the links to resources. | Bookmarked. | | Also... would you look at that! Thousands of items, and no issues | with scrolling! | kfarr wrote: | > Thousands of items, and no issues with scrolling! | | Is this taking a dig at React? If so, good one | lxe wrote: | No but also yes | petargyurov wrote: | This is awesome. I've been wanting to make an illustrated all- | time timeline infographic that doesn't use AD/BC nonsense. I | think I'll use this as a starting point! | [deleted] | acdanger wrote: | What would you use instead? | nichohel wrote: | Well done, but politically charged. For example, why don't we see | an item like "Human activity causes general climate warming trend | but all-cause climate-related deaths (flood, drought, extreme | temperatures) continue massive trend downward"? | | https://ourworldindata.org/ofdacred-international-disaster-d... | https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... | https://news.emory.edu/stories/2021/07/climate_change_heat_r... | | edit: fixed link | tondi wrote: | Interestingly, 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. | rsynnott wrote: | I mean, there's presumably a strong recency bias here. | cosmobot wrote: | Don't forget a correlating exponential growth in human | population. | thangalin wrote: | 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 | NKosmatos wrote: | Next 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 | lastofthemojito wrote: | This Wikipedia page always gives me a similar feeling: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future | softwaredoug wrote: | I can heartily recommend the recent season of Tides of History | podcast if early human history interests you. | | I find it particularly fascinating how we've already evolved | biologically due to one of our inventions (fire control) | mikewarot wrote: | 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. | avgcorrection wrote: | I.e. a tragedy. | wolverine876 wrote: | 'A comedy for those that think, a tragedy for those that feel.' | [deleted] | dr_kiszonka wrote: | This is excellent! I have been looking for a timeline like this | for a while. | | If I could submit a feature request, it would be to add some | mechanism for generating more visual timelines for specific | themes. For example, I wish I could create a timeline of diet- | related events displayed horizontally, with the x-axis being | time. | | Regardless, excellent content, and thanks for sharing! | jorgeleo wrote: | Visual timeline comming up: | | https://xkcd.com/1732/ | xenocyon wrote: | For me at least, this xkcd graphic really made clear how | anthropogenic climate change is truly unprecedented in the | planet's history - it's the massive rate of change. And it's | going to be impossible for the biosphere to adapt well to so | sharp a spike. | FredPret wrote: | Civilization - a superorganism consisting of all of us - is | growing by leaps and bounds. | | Hopefully it eats the whole universe one day | [deleted] | spinningslate wrote: | >Hopefully it eats the whole universe one day | | "I really hope it doesn't" | | -- every individual of every non-human species everywhere else | in the universe. Probably. | FredPret wrote: | Civilization encompasses them too | asimpletune wrote: | This basically just a page full of spoilers for the game | civilization | NoGravitas wrote: | I want to know when existential dread became a part of the human | condition. | sdedovic wrote: | > "The story so far: | | > In the beginning the Universe was created. | | > This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely | regarded as a bad move." | | -- Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe | tantalor wrote: | > 2006 | launch of microblogging service Twitter | skulk wrote: | According to the table, it seems that happened ~2,800,000 years | ago. | rsynnott wrote: | Thousands of years ago at least, though mostly in a religious | context (hells, millenarianism etc) | hexxagone wrote: | No mention of Louis Pasteur ? Odd. | jabo wrote: | 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 true mammals ( ), the | dinosaurs go extinct on 17 August ( ), earliest primates appear | on 9 September ( ), and humans at dawn of 25 December ( ). | | > For a year that starts with the earliest humans ( ), our own | species appears on 19 November ( ), the first built constructions | on 8 December ( ), and agricultural farming begins at midday on | 29 December ( ). | bschne wrote: | 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. | rapnie wrote: | "Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time" is | also quite mindblowing and impressive. | | https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA | armchairhacker wrote: | 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. | Moodles wrote: | This was beautifully illustrated by Carl Sagan in Cosmos: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln8UwPd1z20 | | And humans tame fire at 11:46pm on December 31st. Every 0.2 | seconds is a human lifetime. And all recorded history is just a | few seconds. That's every person you've ever heard of, in the | last ten seconds. Truly humbling. | wolverine876 wrote: | 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 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-04 23:00 UTC)