Humility for Humanity

When I first read Richard Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker", he tried to give some perspective on geological time. He was trying to get past our ingrained inability to perceive how old the earth really is, and over what span of time that the forces of evolution have to work over. Time overcomes all, so to speak. Plus, we as a species haven't really been around all that long. Like, not at all.

Here's another way to think of it - if you plotted out the history of the galaxy/solar system/earth over a year, this is what it would look like this:

Jan 1 (15 bya) Big Bang
March 20 (12 bya) Galaxies form
Sept 2 (5 bya) Formation of our solar system
Sept 14 (4.5 bya) Earth formed
Oct 6 (3.6 bya) First life
Nov 14 (2 bya) Complex single cell
Nov 21 (1.7 bya) Multicelular organisms
Dec 8 (1 bya) Sexual reproduction
Dec 19 (543 mya) Cambrian explosion
Dec 26 (235 mya) Dinosaurs
Dec 30/31 First primates
Dec 31
1:00 AM (40 mya) First monkeys
11:00AM (23 mya) First Apes
9:00 PM (5-6mya) First Hominids (from whence we came)
11:22PM (0.5mya) First use of fire (Homo erectus)
11:59PM (30 000ya) Cave paintings (Homo sapiens: 40-35kya)
+35 sec. (12 000 ya) Farming
+55 sec. (2000ya) Common Era Begins
+59 sec. (500ya) Renaissance

Thank-you, Kali on CPN for this visual aide.