This MedLibrary.org supplementary page on Cosmic Calendar is provided directly from the open source Wikipedia as a service to our readers. Please see the note below on authorship of this content, as well as the Wikipedia usage guidelines. To search for other content from our encyclopedia supplement, please use the form below:
Related Sponsors
The Cosmic Calendar is a scale in which the lifetime of the universe is mapped onto a calendrical year; that is to say, the Big Bang took place on a cosmic January 1 at precisely midnight, and today's date and time is December 31 at midnight.1 On this calendar, the solar system did not appear until September 9, life on Earth arose on September 30, the first dinosaurs appeared on December 25th, the first flowers on December 28th and the first primates on December 30. The first humans did not arrive until around 10:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve, and all of human history has been recorded in the last 10 seconds. The Middle Ages to the present is a little more than one second. On this timescale, an average human life is about 0.15 seconds. The scale was popularized by Carl Sagan in his book The Dragons of Eden and on the television series Cosmos, which he hosted.
The Cosmic Year
1 BIG BANG
January, 1 - Big Bang
May, 1 - Milky Way Galaxy formed
September, 9 - Solar System formed
September, 14 - Earth formed
September, 25 - Oldest rocks known on Earth
2 LIFE BIRTH
October, 2 - Life on Earth.
October, 9 - Oldest fossils
November,1 - Invention of sex
November, 12 - Oldest fossil of photosynthetic plants
November, 15 - Eukaryotes flourish
December, 1 - Oxygen atmosphere begins to develop
December, 17 - Invertebrates flourish
December, 18 - First oceanic plankton
December, 19 - Fish and Vertebrates appear
December, 20 - Vascular plants appear. Plants begin colonization of land
December, 21 - Insects appear. Animals begin colonization of land
3 GIANTS DOMINATION
December, 22 - Amphibians and Winged insects appear
December, 23 - Trees and Reptiles appear
December, 24 - Dinosaurs appears and dominated for over 160 million years
December, 26 - First mammals
December, 27 - First birds. First Flowers
4 GLOBAL EXTINCTION
December, 28 - K-T mass extinction, many forms of life perished, including dinosaurs
5 PRIMATE DOMINATION
December, 29 - First primates
December, 30 - Early brain evolution of primates. First hominids
December, 31 Time 13.30.00 - Ancestors of apes and men
December, 31 Time 22.30.00 - First humans
December, 31 Time 23.00.00 - Use of stone tools
December, 31 Time 23.46.00 - Domestication of fire
December, 31 Time 23.56.00 - Most recent glacial period
December, 31 Time 23.59.00 - Rupestral painting in Europe
December, 31 Time 23.59.20 - Agriculture
December, 31 Time 23.59.35 - Neolithic civilization
6 HISTORY BEGINS
December, 31 Time 23.59.50: End of prehistory and beginning of history.. Dynasties in Sumer.. Ebla and Egypt.. Astronomy
December, 31 Time 23.59.51: Alphabet Akkadian Empire Wheel is invented The Great Deluge.
December, 31 Time 23.59.52: Hammurabic legal codes in Babylon.. Middle Kingdom in Egypt.
December, 31 Time 23.59.53: Bronze metallurgy.. Mycenaean culture.. Trojan War.. Olmec culture..
December, 31 Time 23.59.54: Iron metallurgy. Assyrian Empire.. Kingdom of Israel.. Founding of Carthage..
7 EMPERORS AND GODS
December, 31 Time 23.59.55: Birth of Buddha and Confucious.. Ch'in Dynasty China.. Periclean Athens.. Asokan Indian empire.. Indian Veda holy scriptures are completed.
December, 31 Time 23.59.56: Euclidean geometry, Archimedean physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, Greek Olympic games, Roman Empire, Birth of Christ
December, 31 Time 23.59.57: Birth of Muhammad.. Zero and decimals invented in Indian arithmetic, Rome falls, Moslem conquests
December, 31 Time 23.59.58: Mayan civilization.. Sung Dynasty China.. Byzantine empire.. Mongol invasion.. Crusades.
8 VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY
December, 31 Time 23.59.59: Voyages of discovery from Europe and from Ming Dynasty China.. Columbus lands in America.. Renaissance in Europe..
9 THE LAST SECOND
December, 31 Time 24.00.00: Beginning of modern culture, science and technology development.. French revolution, World War I, World War II, Apollo lands on the moon.. Spacecraft planetary exploration.. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence forms of life..
References
- ^ Therese Puyau Blanchard (1995). "The Universe At Your Fingertips Activity: Cosmic Calendar". Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Retrieved on 2007-12-15.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 22 November 2008, at 03:26.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by MedLibrary.org. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with MedLibrary.org.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Cosmic Calendar".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.