Cosmic Calendar

Method to visualize the chronology of the universe From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cosmic Calendar

The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.787 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science. A similar analogy used to visualize the geologic time scale and the history of life on Earth is the Geologic Calendar.

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A graphical view of the Cosmic Calendar, featuring the months of the year, days of December, the final minute, and the final second

In this visualization, the Big Bang took place at the beginning of January 1 at midnight, and the current moment maps onto the end of December 31 just before midnight.[1] At this scale, there are 438 years per cosmic second, 1.58 million years per cosmic hour, and 37.8 million years per cosmic day.

The Solar System materialized in Cosmic September. The Phanerozoic corresponds only to the latter half of December, with the Cenozoic only happening on the penultimate day on the Calendar. The Quaternary only applies to the last four hours on the final Cosmic Day, with the Holocene only applying to the final 23 Cosmic Seconds. On the other hand, relic radiation is dated at the first fifteen minutes of the very first Cosmic Day; even if we stretch the Cosmic Calendar to 100 years, the relic radiation would still happen just after the start of the second Cosmic Day.

The concept was popularized by Carl Sagan in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden and on his 1980 television series Cosmos.[2] Sagan goes on to extend the comparison in terms of surface area, explaining that if the Cosmic Calendar were scaled to the size of a football field, then "all of human history would occupy an area the size of [his] hand".[3] The Cosmic Calendar was reused in the 2014 series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.[4]

Cosmology

Sources[5][6]

More information Date, Gya (billion years ago) ...
DateGya (billion years ago)Event
1 January, 0:0013.787The Big Bang[7]
1 January, 0:14 13.787 The cosmic background radiation. Would have been last emitted 14 minutes after midnight
1 January, 0:30 13.787 First atoms
19 January 13 GRB 090423, Oldest known Gamma Ray Burst
26 January 12.85 First galaxies form[8]
1 March11Milky Way Galaxy formed
13 May8.8Milky Way Galaxy disk formed
9 September4.57Formation of the Solar System
14 September4.5Formation of the Earth and The Moon
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Date in year calculated from formula

T(days) = 365 days * ( 1- T_Gya/13.787)

Evolution of life on Earth

More information Date, Gya (billion years ago) ...
DateGya (billion years ago)Event
14 September4.1First known remains of biotic life (discovered in 4.1 billion-year-old rocks in Western Australia).[9][10]
21 September3.8First Life (Prokaryotes)[11][12][13]
30 September3.4Photosynthesis
29 October2.4Oxygenation of atmosphere
9 November2Complex cells (Eukaryotes)
5 December0.8First multicellular life[14]
7 December0.67Simple animals
14 December0.55Arthropods (ancestors of insects, arachnids)
17 December0.53Fish and Proto-amphibians
18 December 0.518 Vertebrates
19 December0.45Land plants; Ordovician–Silurian extinction events
20 December 0.4 Jawed fish
21 December0.35Insects and seeds
22 December0.33Amphibians; Late Devonian extinction
23 December0.3Reptiles
24 December0.25Permian–Triassic extinction event; 57% of all biological families and 83% of all genera die
25 December0.23Dinosaurs
26 December0.201Mammals; Triassic–Jurassic extinction event
27 December0.072Birds (avian dinosaurs)
28 December0.13Flowers
30 December, 6:240.066Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, non-avian dinosaurs go extinct;[15] Primates
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Human evolution

More information Date / time, Mya (million years ago) ...
Date / timeMya (million years ago)Event
31 December, 6:0528Apes
31 December, 14:2412.3Hominids
31 December, 20:00 7 Chimpanzees and Humans split
31 December, 22:242.8Homos and stone tools
31 December, 23:440.4Domestication of fire
31 December, 23:520.2Humans
31 December, 23:550.115Beginning of most recent Glacial Period
31 December, 23:580.035Sculpture and painting
31 December, 23:59:320.012Agriculture
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History begins

Summarize
Perspective

More information Date / time, kya (thousand years ago) ...
Date / timekya (thousand years ago)Event
31 December, 23:59:3311.7End of the last Ice Age
31 December, 23:59:418.3Flooding of Doggerland
31 December, 23:59:466Chalcolithic
31 December, 23:59:475.5Early Bronze Age; Proto-writing; Building of Stonehenge Cursus
31 December, 23:59:485First Dynasty of Egypt, Early Dynastic period in Sumer, beginning of Indus Valley civilisation
31 December, 23:59:494.5Alphabet, Akkad, wheel
31 December, 23:59:514Code of Hammurabi, Middle Kingdom of Egypt
31 December, 23:59:523.5Late Bronze Age to early Iron Age; Minoan eruption
31 December, 23:59:533Iron Age; beginning of classical antiquity
31 December, 23:59:542.5Buddha, Mahavira, Zoroaster, Confucius, Achaemenid Empire, Qin dynasty, Classical Greece, Ashokan Empire, Vedas completed, Euclidean geometry, Archimedean physics, Roman Republic
31 December, 23:59:552Ptolemaic astronomy, Roman Empire, Jesus, invention of numeral 0, Gupta Empire
31 December, 23:59:561.5Muhammad, Maya civilization, Song dynasty, Black Death, Byzantine Empire
31 December, 23:59:581Mongol Empire, Maratha Empire, Crusades, Christopher Columbus voyages to the Americas, Renaissance in Europe, Classical music to the time of Johann Sebastian Bach
31 December, 23:59:59 0.5 Modern History; the last 437.5 years before present. 7 Years War, American and French Revolutions, Airplanes, World War 1 and 2, Computers, Spaceflight, First human landing on The Moon
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References

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