[HN Gopher] Timeline of the Human Condition
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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.
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(page generated 2021-11-04 23:00 UTC)