"Time to Scale" video
 

Universe Timeline: 13,800,000,000 years = 6.9 km (4.3 mi)

"Every person you've ever heard of existed in this last centimeter of space, and your life would be less than the width of a hair."

This sounds like something right up my alley. I copied the link address and will watch it ASAP. Thanks.

A hair's breadth of I.

Nemo

You mean my grandfather's stories about where he was when the Big Bang went off aren't true?

Luxury. Before the Big Bang, my grandfather lived in a cardboard box, worked 25 hours a day, and then walked ten miles barefooted to school lugging ten pounds of ice, for no apparent reason. You try to tell that to anyone born after the Big Bang, and they won't believe you.

Before you know it it’s over again.

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Certain days and hours can feel damn near eternal, though. In the "making of" video:

That was an incredible video. Thanks for posting, Julie.

Dovetailing with this: I recently came across an interactive map where you can page through global history (on the millions of years scale) and even mark your city on the map and watch it be covered & uncovered by glaciers etc. Very neat stuff. https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#0

Thanks for this. It should be required viewing.

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To be honest, Julie (which I always try to be but hardly ever am completely), I didn’t find much in the way of new insight/perspective on the scale of time/existence to our own existence within that time.

Though I can’t, as I sit here, recall a specific example, I’ve seen many other representations that have blown my mind and given me a glimpse of (for lack of a better description) some divine-like godless thing at play that we spend our entire lives trying to fathom.

“Live like lilies of the field” gives me more food for thought.
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Thanks for your link, too, Christine! Enjoyed. (Although it took me waaayyyyyy longer than it should have to figure out that the menu items were not in chronological order.)

Sorry that it wasn't your style, Jim. You might (or might not) enjoy this one by the same guy:

A New View of the Moon

And don't forget, not only are we just a flicker in time but we are also just a grain of sand in space.

So what's the moral?

Oh, I can think of several for me. Yours may vary.

One is that the next time I am tempted to fact-check friggin' cheese prices for people who are probably more interested in boycotting Bud Lite, I should remember that I don't actually have time for such trivia, since all we are is dust in the wind, etc.

Another moral might be that however insignificant our individual (and even our collective) lives may seem, they have an astonishing impact on the other lives around us, for good or ill. So it's worth trying to make my own blip more positive than negative. And it seems less daunting to do that if it's just a blip.

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Maybe it's the moral contained in the Seuss children's book Horton Hears a Who!

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I agree, Jim. The unspoken premise that bigger is better or more important simply isn't true. Would we humans feel more important if we occupied an additional hair's width on the timeline? I certainly wouldn't. That's the thing about being finite creatures in an infinite universe. No matter how big you are, you're still finite, and finite always looks puny compared to the infinite. But our physical presence isn't the whole story. It's what we are that counts, not how much space we take up. Otherwise you'd have to say that our houses matter more than we do, and people are less significant than large boulders. The good Dr. Seuss had it right: a person's a person no matter how small.

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Ahh! With your synopsis and conclusions that you extract from it and apply to real-life, it now makes good sense. Especially with regard to inflation and the price of cheese. Your droll, adroit sense of humor always has a way of brightening things for me.

And yes to the notion that the flap of a butterfly's wings can be profound.

That video of the moon in the telescope captures humanity in its most beautiful, curious, astonished way. Thanks for that. (I've always had a thing for the moon five my surname).


We could skip rock from one astonishing revelation to the next, I'm sure... Look at this video footage of the 2017 total eclipse of the sun. (I watched if from Homer AK)

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