History, in the sense of everything that has ever been recorded about the past, is unbelievably recent when you compare it with the age of the earth. In fact it is so young that one of the simplest ways of understanding this is to imagine the entire age of the earth – that’s about 4700 million years as just one single year. OK?
Using round figures on that scale, a month would equal just over 391,000,000 years. A day would equal getting on for 13,000,000 years. And an hour would amount to more than 500,000 years.
Right. Imagine that it’s New Year’s Eve at the end of that year covering the world’s entire existence. Imagine that the clock has started chiming twelve to mark the beginning of the new year. How did the old year shape up?
In a word – slowly. In two words – very slowly! It didn’t start to show any signs of life until May. The first mammals didn’t appear until around Christmas. Our earliest ancestor didn’t arrive until about six hours ago. In the last hour there have been no fewer than four separate ice ages. The last of these ended just ninety seconds ago. Our earliest wall-painting ancestor only got to work at one minute before midnight.
That does not leave a lot of time for history. No, we have had to pack in a lot since the clock started striking twelve. Christopher Columbus sailed to America during the eighth stroke. And space exploration, televisions, video-recorders, microwaves and McDonald’s were all invented a split second ago.
Picture Credit : Google
