Timeline of the Human Condition
southampton.ac.uk
southampton.ac.uk
> 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 ( ).
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.
Recognising the absolutely definitive role of energy on progress and history is a critically important advance in understanding mechanisms of history.
Proton decay, and the death of everything that we can know, is just the beginning.
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.
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.
Maybe singularity type stuff will allow us to hang out a while longer. Physics type evolution of stars and plants -> biological evolution of lifeforms reproducing and dying -> AI evolution of our mind children as it were.
https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf
Here are the sources used to craft the book:
You nicely avoided Nuclear Power which is the real game changer if you want to produce energy at scale with very little CO2.
....
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.
This seems like a anthropocentric view of the world. Planets moved immense distances, there were generation after generation of bacteria, mountains rose up and crumbled, seas were made and disappeared again.
A lot happened before we showed up. A lot will happen after we're gone, also.
If you look at a timeline, you might see:
- 3.5 bya: First prokaryote
- 2.5 bya: FIrst eukaryote
- 0.6 bya: Cambrian explosion
- 0.44 bya: First terrestrial life
I think that's an important perspective, but I am not seeing how it applies in this case: We're talking mostly about evolutionary changes. For example, right now evolution is happening but it's unlikely that you or I will ever notice it in our relatively short lifespans. And the chance of an event as big as the first eukaryote or the K/T extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs) is very, very tiny.
For around the first billion years of earth's history, there was no life at all (as best we can tell right now) - nada, zilch, 'nothing' happening evolutionarily, for most intents and purposes (afaik).
Humans are special because our constructs are orders of magnitude more complex than anything that came before. Opposable thumbs and large wrinkled brains and a lottery ticket combination of environmental factors allowed us to happen. We're a fundamentally different type of thing than anything that we know of that came before. It isn't an anthropomorphic conceit, it's a matter of physical evidence and computational theory. Nothing else does what human brains do. It's a little silly to dismiss it as somehow not real. It's as real as fusion producing light from the core of a sun, or pulsars blazing with energies that outshine entire galaxies.
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.
I thought the Phoenician are credited for the alphabet. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_language
> The Phoenician alphabet was spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.
A third one (BRI 2013) is buried under a mention of the original Silk Roads in 100 BCE.
People's Republic founding is omitted, despite being the first post-colonial/indigenous "superstate". It will certainly be at least as historically consequential as the founding of the USA. No mention of PRC eradicating extreme poverty nor surpassing the USA in GDP PPP.
Reading the timeline, you get the sense that all recent human progress is occurring in the West and the West alone is positioned to address global issues. Which is a very distorted view.
That is certainly absurd! I hadn't looked past about 5,000 yrs ago.
> the first post-colonial/indigenous "superstate"
I've read a good amount of Chinese history and other works, including by Chinese authors (translated), and I haven't heard that idea so I am interested in learning a bit:
Who uses the term? Historians? Political scientists? The CCP? Is it new?
What do you meant by "superstate"? A major power?
Post-colonial: The US, Canada, etc. are post-colonial, former British colonies. If you mean, after the West's period of colonization post-Industrial Revolution, what about India, which was founded a few years before? Japan, which was itself a colonial power (with some horrible consequences)? The post-WWI Middle East?
Finally, I'm not quite sure how 'indigenous' applies. China has been a collection of cultures, enough so that holding it together has always preoccupied whoever was in power. My impression is that it is more like Europe in that sense, including varying local languages, than the US (though different than both).
All those questions don't make it wrong; they are merely what I don't understand.
> It will certainly be at least as historically consequential as the founding of the USA. No mention of PRC eradicating extreme poverty nor surpassing the USA in GDP PPP.
> Reading the timeline, you get the sense that all recent human progress is occurring in the West and the West alone is positioned to address global issues. Which is a very distorted view.
Isn't this as Sino-centric as the timeline is Western-centric? If we know such approaches are factually distorting (you just made a good point about it), and we know also that nationalistic competition leads to catastrophe (WWII being a prominent example), why take them? Do you want to intentionally make the same mistakes as the timeline?
I hope the people of China do great things - not only for themselves, but for the world, and that they have freedom to live their lives as they choose, with health and prosperity. Do better than the colonial powers.
I don't know. This is the term used by the OP, hence quotes. If USA is a "superstate" then PRC is one as well.
> Finally, I'm not quite sure how 'indigenous' applies.
China is primarily populated by the same peoples that have lived there for millennia. There was no mass ethnic cleansing as took place in the Americas/Australia/etc.
> Isn't this as Sino-centric as the timeline is Western-centric?
Is it Sino-centric to have a balanced view of human history?
There's much more we can do in the world, but not through ignorance and outrage. You can see right here that we can learn nothing from it, gain no ground.
"rapid colonisation of Australia by humans during 5,000 years, transecting the continent along superhighways (ancient Sahul): maritime exploration"
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.
Also... would you look at that! Thousands of items, and no issues with scrolling!
Is this taking a dig at React? If so, good one
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!
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.
Wikipedia overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History
Book (one of many): https://www.worldcat.org/title/origin-story-a-big-history-of...
There was at one time a lecture series running about 30--40 episodes on YouTube, though I don't find that presently. There are still numerous matching hits on YouTube for "Big History" "David Christian", though I've not explored them for matches. Shorter overviews by Christian exist, including his TED Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs
Several people have mentioned Vaclav Smil. His 1995 Energy in World History and 2017 Energy and Civilization cover the past 100,000 or 10,000 years of the history shown in TFA, largely looking at history through the lens of energy. It's a fascinating story.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/...
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
> 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
I guess they were right about terminal boredom.
* 445,000,000 mass extinction in two pulses across 1 million years, eliminating more than three-quarters of all species (Late Ordovician), linked to volcanic activity
* 375,000,000 mass extinction in a series of pulses across 20 million years, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Late Devonian), linked to climatic cooling
* 251,900,000 Earth’s largest mass extinction, eliminating nine tenths of all species during 61 thousand years (Permian-Triassic transition), caused by hot and acidifying volcanic CO₂ emissions
* 201,300,000 mass extinction event, eliminating more than two-thirds of all species (Triassic-Jurassic transition), linked to volcanic CO₂ equivalent to projections for CE 21ˢᵗ century anthropogenic emissions
* 66,000,000 abrupt mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of all species, following a 9-km wide asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico (Cretaceous-Paleogene transition) → rapid diversification of flowering plants and mammals
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.
With these measures, the Milky Way was "born" about 49 galactic years ago and will "die" in 49 galactic years, so we are almost precisely in the middle. It's an interesting coincidence, that on this scale, eukaryotes appeared 6.666 galactic years ago (from [1]).
I find it particularly fascinating how we’ve already evolved biologically due to one of our inventions (fire control)
There is a wonderful book showcasing an exhibit at the Montreal Museum of art.
I guess you could say this exhibit’s thesis is to talk about the effect of photography in culture to take what is numinous about nature (vast beyond measure) and to make it concrete and visible.
Similarly the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment changed culture. As I recall it was Keates who lamented Newton for ruining poetry.
Cosmos : From Romanticism to Avant-Garde, 1801-2001 By Clair, Jean (Editor) ISBN 10: 3791320890
"Agent Smith: Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment; but you humans do not. Instead you multiply, and multiply, until every resource is consumed. The only way for you to survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern... a virus."
Adaption is not uniquely human, we are simply the first to accomplish it without speciation
Thank you for sharing it
Species-wide abolition of slavery
Species-wide abolition of torture
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.
With that said, no, progress is not a given, and we have one million and one ways to shoot ourselves in the feet. Both climate change and getting depressed and suicidal about climate change count, though the later is worse, because it affects our collective self-esteem and our capacity to work for a better future.
But there's also an absolutely undeniable acceleration in physical and other quantifiable bases (knowledge, understanding, population, global impacts, energy utilisation, raw materials consumption, pollution) through time.
For Earth, the very rapid emergence of life (within the first few hundred million years), and then the lack of extensive complexity emerging for another 3 billion years, until the Cambrian explosion, is especially notable.
Looking from the present backwards, what strikes me isn't that "the singularity" hasn't happened, but that we've seen multiple singularities, building on one another (with occasional back-tracking).
It's subjective, of course. Maybe I'm just old and nostalgic.
Vaclav Smil (already mentioned several times in this thread) points to the half-century from 1875--1925 as the peak of invention, and more specifically, the decade of the 1880s. This was the time when discoveries based on electricity, coal-tar chemistry, petroleum, some bits of genetics, and others were coming into the fore. There are very few modern inventions which cannot be traced to this period. (Radio, TV, lasers, microwaves, and genetic engineering are the main exceptions). I see this as a landmark breakthrough in both knowledge and means, the latter largely supplied through the vast untapped energy of fossil fuels.
(Aknowledging their impact and declaring them an unqualified good are two entirely different matters. Yes, they changed our world and made modernity possible. Yes, they will destory that as well if we keep using them, and even if we want to, they will ultimately be exhausted.)
There are a few laws of progress. Moore's refers specifically to network and size effects, and has some foundation in business practices and goals (that is, what we see as "Moore's law" phenomenon is in part driven by the performance and product targets and timelines of firms in the sector). There's also Wright's Law, which refers to the level of improvement seen with additional experience. If memory serves, about a 20% efficiency gain with each doubling of output. (This was noted especially in the US with military output during WWII, especially in the rate of aircraft and ship manufacture.)
There are also scaling laws which refer to the reduction of defects, increases in precision or accuracy, and reduction of downtime. Here, each additional "nine" of performance tends to cost 10x the previous --- a case of rapidly diminishing returns.
On the progress of science, I've only looked into this casually and haven't found a good or suitable measure (itself a fairly deep question --- typical metrics such as patents filed have ... ginormous fucking issues, as a term of art...). But looking at Nobel Prize awards in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, what we tend to see is highly foundational discoveries prior to about 1960, and remarkably less so afterwards. In all three cases, I also note a strong presence of detection and measurement discoveries in the post-1960 era, which is to say, discoveries that increase our ability to detect various phenomena, as in remote astronomical measurements, chemical detection, or looking at body or cellular processes. Physics seems especially notable, with the pre-1960 period seeing numerous particles, forces, and principles (quantum mechanics, relativistic effects (but not the Theory of Relativity itself), and basic phenomena such as radiation).
I've got thoughts on that, you might try looking up my past threads on "ontology of technology" --- these are informational mechanisms.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Ah! Really interesting!
There was a Germany 2900 years ago?
They could have gone with central Europe, I guess, but that's vaguer and still arguably anachronistic, as its use as a geographical term (as opposed to the mythological princess) isn't recorded until c. 500 BC.
if anything unsustainability is spiraling
wrt climate, this is a bit more pop science but illustrates something similar for the recent centuries.
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
Reference to US declaration of independence leading to US superstate, but no mention of it's role in spreading the concept of individual rights worldwide. Reference to "the Wealth of Nations" in negative context, whereas Emmanuel Kant in positive context and in particular, Malthus with his since-demonstrated-to-be-glaring-absurdity in a positive light, complete with an excuse as to why it is still not invalid.
It's an interesting thing, but it would be better if that sort of personal bias were left out of something attempting to be a canonical summary of the history of humankind.