It’s a conversation starter – it raises more questions than it answers.
It’s one missing piece of the puzzle when thinking about the kind of future we want.
A way of me saying how much I love life on our one and only home, Earth.
Hasn’t it been done before?
When I was 9 watching this had a great impact on me. It’s the 1979 TV series “Life on Earth” by David Attenborough. In it he helped viewers grasp geological time by condensing the Earth’s first 4½ billion years into one year.
He described us as living in the very last moments of 31 December, only having evolved a few minutes ago.
Others have done the same exercise in a variety of ways. Here’s how Wikipedia does it:
Deep Time Walk takes us on a journey through 4.6bn years of Earth history via a 4.6km walk with an app to guide you.
So far I’ve only found a couple of projects that consider the future:
“Time-lapse of the Future” by John D. Boswell. This amazing animation starts at the present day and goes right to the end of the universe and time itself.
Prof David Kipping of the Cool Worlds Lab gives us a thought-provoking sketch of the possibilities for “Earth Over The Next Billion Years“
But I have yet to find a timeline that considers the whole life of our planet, past, present and future.
So, I made this one.
But before we set off let’s be clear – it’s just an illustration. It can’t be exact because it assumes that the birth and death of the Earth both happen in a split second, which we can be pretty sure isn’t the case for either.
Secondly, all the entries along this timeline are taken from available sources reflecting current ideas about the past and future. All I’m doing is providing a way of putting them into perspective. I’d be happy to hear from you if you have some to add or that you think should be corrected.
“The old rule of forecasting was to make as many forecasts as possible and publicise the ones you got right. The new rule is to forecast so far in the future, no one will know you got it wrong.”
Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles