The Sum of Life on Earth
I’ve been reading this book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for just about six months now. It’s not that it’s a particularly long book, I’m just pretty lazy. Though the book is pretty much amazing and I learn something new on just about every page. Bryson, who is most famous for his travel writing, has a way of summing up the history of this planet in such a way that it’s not only fascinating but sometimes pretty comical.
The other day I was reading in the section about life on Earth, page 336-337 to be exact, and came across this passage:
If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 AM, with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 PM trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 PM plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 PM and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant.
Kind of makes you wonder doesn’t it? Anyway, just thought I’d share. Hopefully I don’t get sued for posting that here.