The evolution of life in 60 seconds

[bibblebub]

There is a thread http://www.theanswerb...e/Question905683.html which has a link to a demonstration of the scale of the universe.

In a similar vein, here is a link to a video that shows the timescale involved in the evolution of life on this planet:

http://seedmagazine.c...f_life_in_60_seconds/

and like real time the video only goes in one direction.

[jake-the-peg]

Cool ! thanks for sharing - I'd have liked to see more graphics of what was described though and it would be good to see one of the evolution of life

[bibblebub]

The point of the video is to show that just about everything of which we are aware came about in a small fraction of the timescale of the age of the Earth, it's not intended to show obfuscating details, it's a much broader view than how individual species evolved.

So there's no point in having fancy graphics - most of it would whizz by in the last second and you wouldn't see it anyway.

[jake-the-peg]

Having everything whiz by in the last few seconds is what I thought would be the point.

In terms of visualisation of large numbers I use the following

I imagine a meter squared of millimeter graph paper - a million squares

I imagine a stack of a thousand such pages - a billion squares

Age of the Universe 14 such stacks crossing off one one millimeter box every year

It's the distance rather than the time that are truely unimaginable with my system you'd have to cross off a box for each light year - but a light year is pretty unimaginable to start with!