Thursday, January 5, 2012

star stuff



I started reading The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan last week, and when I saw his cosmic calendar in print I knew it had to be the first Star Stuff post of the year! Sagan had a remarkably brilliant way of illustrating the history of time in a way that you can actually wrap your head around. Think of every single second that has passed since the Big Bang as one single calendar year. The Big Bang is the first second of the first day of January. Humans don't emerge until 10:30PM on December 31st, New Year's Eve! You can click on the image to view it bigger and see all of the different milestones in Earth's history, and when they happened on the cosmic calendar.