If life was one day

From Simia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

If the evolution of animals was one day... (600 million years)

  • From 1am to 4am, most of the modern types of animals have evolved (Cambrian explosion)
  • Animals get on land a bit at 3am. Early risers! It takes them until 7am to actually breath air.
  • Around noon, first octopuses show up.
  • Dinosaurs arrive at 3pm, and stick around until quarter to ten.
  • Humans and chimpanzees split off about fifteen minutes ago, modern humans and Neanderthals lived in the last minute, and the pyramids were built around 23:59:59.2.

In that world, if that was a Sunday:

  • Saturday would have started with the introduction of sexual reproduction
  • Friday would have started by introducing the nucleus to the cell
  • Thursday recovering from Wednesday's catastrophe
  • Wednesday photosynthesis started, and lead to a lot of oxygen which killed a lot of beings just before midnight
  • Tuesday bacteria show up
  • Monday first forms of life show up
  • Sunday morning, planet Earth forms, pretty much at the same time as the Sun.
  • Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about a week older
  • The Universe is about another week older - about 22 days.

There are several things that surprised me here.

  • That dinosaurs were around for such an incredibly long time. Dinosaurs were around for seven hours, and humans for a minute.
  • That life started so quickly after Earth was formed, but then took so long to get to animals.
  • That the Earth and the Sun started basically at the same time.

Addendum April 27: Álvaro Ortiz, a graphic designer from Madrid, turned this text into an infographic.

Simia

Previous entry:
Architecture for a multilingual Wikipedia
Next entry:
Tim Bray leaving Amazon in protest