Step back to see how science and humanity fit in the big picture (original) (raw)

Nature volume 407, page 128 (2000)Cite this article

Sir — Although your Millennium Essays focus on events in the past 1,000 years, it is easy to lose perspective when analysing time-windows much greater than our life-span. Our brains are not adapted to think in vast time-frames. So it may be helpful to take a bird's-eye view of our past millennium by using a series of time-windows — each one-hundredth the size of the previous one — to extend the analysis deeper in time.

In the largest time-window imaginable, comprising tens of millions of millennia, the past millennium doesn't show up. This window places the formation of Earth and the emergence of life in perspective: if the event creating our present Universe (the Big Bang) occurred around 15.5 million millennia ago, the development of life on Earth represents about 25% of the history of our Universe.

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  1. Department of Biology, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, 1080, Venezuela
    Klaus Jaffe

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Jaffe, K. Step back to see how science and humanity fit in the big picture.Nature 407, 128 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35025284

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