yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Cosmic Calendar | Cosmos: Possible Worlds


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

This cosmic calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang into a single calendar. Either every month is a little more than a billion years, every day a little less than 40 million. A single hour is almost 2 million years. That first day of the cosmic year began with the Big Bang almost 14 billion years ago.

Nothing really happened in our neck of the universe until about 3 billion years later, March 15th, when our Milky Way galaxy began to form. 6 billion years after that, our star, the Sun, was born. It was August 31st on the cosmic calendar. Jupiter and the other planets, including our own, would soon follow.

The atmosphere on Earth was a toxic environment for our kind of life. Then, September 21st on the cosmic calendar, tiny creatures that could shove off the methane and eat carbon dioxide and sunlight for breakfast found a way to make a living in the ocean by gobbling up the carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen. They turned the sky blue, and then the oxygenation of the atmosphere created the ozone layer for the first time.

Life was free to leave the oceans for the land. Now life could grow larger and venture forth into new territories. Sometime on December 26th, about 200 million years ago, the first mammals evolved. They brought a new feature to life on Earth: the neocortex.

Then, late on New Year's Eve, a mutation occurred in the DNA of just one of our ancestors. One base pair of a single gene programmed the neocortex to grow larger still. Maybe it was a random zap from a cosmic ray or a simple error in transmission from one cell to another. Whatever it was, it led to a change in our species that ultimately affected every other species of life on Earth.

By the last second of the cosmic year, there was no place on Earth that we had left untouched. All of it comes down to nothing more than a single run on our tiny DNA ladder to the stars. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Exploring Rodeo, Masculinity Through Photography | National Geographic
(Western music) (cow mooing) - I’m a contributing photographer to National Geographic Magazine. I relentlessly want to understand things, and particularly things that are not part of my sort of orbit of perception. (twangy Western music) (shouting) I’m in…
Kevin O'Leary - Music, Style, Money - Harry Rosen
Hi, I’m Kevin O’Leary from Dragon’s Den and Shark Tank, and I’m wearing a crisp Tom Ford from Harry Rosen. Oh yeah, baby! Business is so disciplined and scientific; it’s black and white. Either you make money or you lose it. Music is chaos. You need both …
Warren Buffett: How to Make Your First $1 Million
Warren Buffett is universally regarded as the greatest investor ever and has a net worth of over 100 billion dollars. However, this wasn’t always the case. Buffett got his start at just 11 years old when he made his first investment, buying three shares o…
8 Key Principles To OVERCOME Self-Doubt & Negative Thoughts | Stoicism Insights
Every single one of us at some point in our lives faces that sneaky, undermining whisper of self-doubt. It’s like a shadow that lingers just out of sight, waiting to cloud our decisions and dampen our spirits. But here’s the catch. The real battle isn’t a…
From Broke To $500,000,000 (The Empire of Ben Mallah)
So I’d like to introduce you to the most loud-mouthed, over-the-top offensive real estate mogul you’re ever going to meet: Ben Mala. “I bought it because I’m a big fat [__] business, that’s what you worry about.” He is your true rags-to-riches story, hav…
Impose | Vocabulary | Khan Academy
Hey there wordsmiths! This video is about the word impose. Impose, it’s a verb, and it means to force something onto others, kind of like how I impose my taste in music on you in these videos. You didn’t ask for this; I just put it on to you, which is in…