History of Earth

[slayer202]

This is from my science102 class, trying to explain the timeline of earth's 4.5 billion years:


"Let's imagine that we can compress 4.5 billion years, the age of Earth, into a single year. Then, the Planet Earth would have begun forming from matter surrounding the Sun on January 1. The oldest known Earth rocks woudl appear at the end of February. Simple bacteria life would appear in the sea at the end of March, and more complex plants and animals would not emerge until late October. Dinosuars would rule Earth in mid-December and would disappear by December 26. Homo Sapiens would appear at 11:50 p.m. on the evening of December 31. All of recorded human history would take place in the last minute of New Year' Eve."


I just found that pretty awesome, and thought I would share. Common knowledge maybe, but interesting still

 

[lyssword]

no it was 4000 years!

 

[mitchel]

Originally posted by: slayer202
This is from my science102 class, trying to explain the timeline of earth's 4.5 billion years:


"Let's imagine that we can compress 4.5 billion years, the age of Earth, into a single year. Then, the Planet Earth would have begun forming from matter surrounding the Sun on January 1. The oldest known Earth rocks woudl appear at the end of February. Simple bacteria life would appear in the sea at the end of March, and more complex plants and animals would not emerge until late October. Dinosuars would rule Earth in mid-December and would disappear by December 26. Homo Sapiens would appear at 11:50 p.m. on the evening of December 31. All of recorded human history would take place in the last minute of New Year' Eve."


I just found that pretty awesome, and thought I would share. Common knowledge maybe, but interesting still

:thumbsup:

 

[Kalvin00]

Yep..earth on a geologic time scale makes us look pretty damn insignificant.

Another thing that kinda boggles me is that humans roamed for thousands of years...and then, suddenly, in a span of ~150 years, we go from primitive beings to having all the luxuries that we enjoy today. Kinda weird.

 

[Farang]

If you liked that sort of thing you should read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. He uses all sorts of analogies like that for, well, nearly everything. Once you get into the small size of atoms and the large size of the universe, the analogies can be mind boggling.

 

[slayer202]

Originally posted by: Farang
If you liked that sort of thing you should read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. He uses all sorts of analogies like that for, well, nearly everything. Once you get into the small size of atoms and the large size of the universe, the analogies can be mind boggling.

eh, I kind of like having my head non-exploded

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: lyssword
no it was 4000 years!

I believe it was actually 4000bc - or 4004bc - wait, I'll look it up. Will get back later with the precise year after the next sunday school.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Kalvin00
Yep..earth on a geologic time scale makes us look pretty damn insignificant.

Another thing that kinda boggles me is that humans roamed for thousands of years...and then, suddenly, in a span of ~150 years, we go from primitive beings to having all the luxuries that we enjoy today. Kinda weird.

Technology's growth is exponential, or at least something like that.

I love hearing about the history of CAD software, or how computers save so much time. One of my professors talks frequently about "the bad old days," when doing design revisions could mean 4 weeks of reworking page after page of calculations. He was a programmer "in a former life," and could eventually write programs to automate a lot of this stuff, able to take what was previously a 40 hour job, and do it in less than an hour. And then the introduction of solid modeling CAD software, just the most primitive versions of it (you know, because they dealt with primitives, such as cones and cubes), allowed even more rapid advances in design. I just worked through an assignment in Pro/Engineer that uses the EFX extension, which gives access to a huge library of standard construction parts - it makes assembling a bridge a breeze. Do a spreadsheet to calculate the loading and required members, draw a skeleton for the structure, select the proper members, and place them.

And then manufacturing. Just in the past century, automation has done so much. I remember seeing pictures of guys working in assembly line jobs, just hundreds of them in a line, doing some tedious, repetitive task. Now a machine can do the same job 24hrs a day, at a much higher speed, with better precision and accuracy, freeing up the people (theoretically) to do other things that are productive to society. And as machines get smarter, even more jobs can be automated.

Then is the rate at which information can be exchanged. Sending design plans to a remote site could have taken days or weeks in the past. Now a detailed 3D CAD file can be sent anywhere in the world in a few seconds.

All of this makes for an incredible increase in overall productivity.

 

[judasmachine]

Originally posted by: seemingly random

Originally posted by: lyssword
no it was 4000 years!

I believe it was actually 4000bc - or 4004bc - wait, I'll look it up. Will get back later with the precise year after the next sunday school.

I just prayed and got the answer 4003 years, 7 months, and 25 days.

Seriously though, that is a cool way of looking at it, compressed into comprehensible units.

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: judasmachine
Seriously though, that is a cool way of looking at it, compressed into comprehensible units.

Indeed, it shows our (we humans) position in the larger scheme of things.

Now, if we could use this to represent a trillion dollars...

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
... freeing up the people (theoretically) to do other things that are productive to society...

Yes - like time to discuss bathroom habits on atot...

 

[Farang]

Originally posted by: seemingly random

Originally posted by: judasmachine
Seriously though, that is a cool way of looking at it, compressed into comprehensible units.

Indeed, it shows our (we humans) position in the larger scheme of things.

Now, if we could use this to represent a trillion dollars...

Easy... Mr. Politician, that $3 trillion budget is the equivalent of 600,000,000 nights with prostitutes. That is, you could go for the next 1,643,835 years and have a high-class prostitute every night.

Mr. Politician, if you lived for 50 more years, that would buy you 30,000 high-class prostitutes, every night, for the rest of your life, and leave you enough left over to buy some Viagra.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

:shocked:

This thread is win.

 

[Baked]

The earth is flat. The sun revolves around earth.

 

[maziwanka]

Originally posted by: mitchel

Originally posted by: slayer202
This is from my science102 class, trying to explain the timeline of earth's 4.5 billion years:


"Let's imagine that we can compress 4.5 billion years, the age of Earth, into a single year. Then, the Planet Earth would have begun forming from matter surrounding the Sun on January 1. The oldest known Earth rocks woudl appear at the end of February. Simple bacteria life would appear in the sea at the end of March, and more complex plants and animals would not emerge until late October. Dinosuars would rule Earth in mid-December and would disappear by December 26. Homo Sapiens would appear at 11:50 p.m. on the evening of December 31. All of recorded human history would take place in the last minute of New Year' Eve."


I just found that pretty awesome, and thought I would share. Common knowledge maybe, but interesting still

:thumbsup:

word

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Kalvin00
... in a span of ~150 years, we go from primitive beings ...

I think Ben, Tom and John (among many others) may be offended.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: seemingly random

Originally posted by: Jeff7
... freeing up the people (theoretically) to do other things that are productive to society...

Yes - like time to discuss bathroom habits on atot...

No, we're leveraging various knowledgebases in a temporally efficient, electron-based fashion.

 

[NanoStuff]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Technology's growth is exponential, or at least something like that.

It's more of a higher level logarithmic function, one which is subtle enough to not be easily deducible within a limited period of time but drastically obvious over extended periods.

If technology were exponential, people 500 years ago would experience the same relative changes over, say, 20 years as we do over 20 years. In reality, people back then would have possibly not been witness to anything new at all over their entire lives, let alone 20 years.

In other words, the doubling time in this exponential venture is shortening, and perhaps even the rate of shortening is in itself exponential. A recursive acceleration of sorts.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Technology's growth is exponential, or at least something like that.

It's more of a higher level logarithmic function, one which is subtle enough to not be easily deducible within a limited period of time but drastically obvious over extended periods.

If technology were exponential, people 500 years ago would experience the same relative changes over, say, 20 years as we do over 20 years. In reality, people back then would have possibly not been witness to anything new at all over their entire lives, let alone 20 years.

In other words, the doubling time in this exponential venture is shortening, and perhaps even the rate of shortening is in itself exponential. A recursive acceleration of sorts.

Um no that's linear growth or at best a low order power growth. What you are talking about is in fact the very definition of exponential growth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Exponential.png

Green line = exponential growth. Let the horizontal be time and the vertical be some measure of the amount of change experienced by people over that interval. Look at any given fixed interval early on and the same interval of time latter on. Exactly what you said, exponential growth.

 

[Eeezee]

Originally posted by: Kalvin00
Yep..earth on a geologic time scale makes us look pretty damn insignificant.

Another thing that kinda boggles me is that humans roamed for thousands of years...and then, suddenly, in a span of ~150 years, we go from primitive beings to having all the luxuries that we enjoy today. Kinda weird.

150 years seems a little short... did we really go from nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes to the Internet in 150 years?

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: mitchel

Originally posted by: slayer202
This is from my science102 class, trying to explain the timeline of earth's 4.5 billion years:


"Let's imagine that we can compress 4.5 billion years, the age of Earth, into a single year. Then, the Planet Earth would have begun forming from matter surrounding the Sun on January 1. The oldest known Earth rocks woudl appear at the end of February. Simple bacteria life would appear in the sea at the end of March, and more complex plants and animals would not emerge until late October. Dinosuars would rule Earth in mid-December and would disappear by December 26. Homo Sapiens would appear at 11:50 p.m. on the evening of December 31. All of recorded human history would take place in the last minute of New Year' Eve."


I just found that pretty awesome, and thought I would share. Common knowledge maybe, but interesting still

:thumbsup:

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: Eeezee

Originally posted by: Kalvin00
Yep..earth on a geologic time scale makes us look pretty damn insignificant.

Another thing that kinda boggles me is that humans roamed for thousands of years...and then, suddenly, in a span of ~150 years, we go from primitive beings to having all the luxuries that we enjoy today. Kinda weird.

150 years seems a little short... did we really go from nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes to the Internet in 150 years?

yeah, there was a reason we had a period known as the "dark ages"

we were on the verge of so much cool stuff as early as the time of the ancient greeks and romans, stuff like steam power...imagine if the Renaissance and industrial revolution had taken place 1500 years earlier? We'd probably be colonizing other planets by now

 

[NanoStuff]

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Technology's growth is exponential, or at least something like that.

It's more of a higher level logarithmic function, one which is subtle enough to not be easily deducible within a limited period of time but drastically obvious over extended periods.

If technology were exponential, people 500 years ago would experience the same relative changes over, say, 20 years as we do over 20 years. In reality, people back then would have possibly not been witness to anything new at all over their entire lives, let alone 20 years.

In other words, the doubling time in this exponential venture is shortening, and perhaps even the rate of shortening is in itself exponential. A recursive acceleration of sorts.

Um no that's linear growth or at best a low order power growth. What you are talking about is in fact the very definition of exponential growth.

Um yes, look at that graph. From one integer to the next, the relative proportions remain the same across the entire scale. It's always 2x the previous.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

Originally posted by: Locut0s

Originally posted by: NanoStuff

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Technology's growth is exponential, or at least something like that.

It's more of a higher level logarithmic function, one which is subtle enough to not be easily deducible within a limited period of time but drastically obvious over extended periods.

If technology were exponential, people 500 years ago would experience the same relative changes over, say, 20 years as we do over 20 years. In reality, people back then would have possibly not been witness to anything new at all over their entire lives, let alone 20 years.

In other words, the doubling time in this exponential venture is shortening, and perhaps even the rate of shortening is in itself exponential. A recursive acceleration of sorts.

Um no that's linear growth or at best a low order power growth. What you are talking about is in fact the very definition of exponential growth.

Um yes, look at that graph. From one integer to the next, the relative proportions remain the same across the entire scale. It's always 2x the previous.

Yes but that doesn't fit with your explanation of:

people 500 years ago would experience the same relative changes over, say, 20 years as we do over 20 years

 

[NanoStuff]

It fits exactly. If people back then experienced a doubling of capability over a certain time period, people today would experience the doubling over the same time period. That's exponential.