Post by TWJT on Apr 14, 2023 15:13:20 GMT -5
A fact that absolutely blows my mind is how small of a portion of the universe's existence includes the era of modern technology. The universe started 13.7 billion years ago. Our solar system, Earth, and sun all started to come together 4.5 billion years ago, so for 9 billion years there was no Earth. The universe has existed longer without Earth than with. Then another billion until the first living cell. Then it took many more hundreds of millions/billions of years to go from the first cell to the worm to the fish to amphibians to reptiles (and the age of the dinosaurs, which lasted 160 million years), to small mammals (which existed under dinosaurs), to the first primates, to a common ancestor primate to chimps, orangutans, gorillas, humans (I think this was 8 million years ago). Then finally the chain starts that leads to hominids like Australopithecus-Afarensis (Lucy), 3.8-2.9 million years ago, then characters like Homo Erectus, Homo Rudolfensis, etc., Neanderthals, and then FINALLY Homo-Sapiens 150K years ago. Then it took tens of thousands of years for humans to leave Africa and reach Australia, Asia (40,000 years ago), Europe (40,000 years ago), the Americas (10-20K years ago), etc. Then the founding of great empires like Babylon, Assyria, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient Israel in the Middle East and North Africa (this all started about 5,000 years ago with the beginning of civilization, written language, farming, etc.), then FINALLY Western empires like Greece and Rome, the foundation of Christianity out of Judaism, the creation of the Roman Catholic Church, the fall of Rome and rise of Catholic Europe, and FINALLY the end of the Middle Ages, the Protestant Reformation, discovery of the New World by Europeans, and the foundation of America, other democratic revolutions like the French Revolution, the US Civil War, European colonial takeover of the Middle East and Africa in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the founding of communism and fascism, the World Wars, the fall of the European empires, the Cold War, and then FINALLY the emergence of the US as the main world power in 1991. Throughout ALL of that, modern technology really has only existed for like 80 years. I mean, there was an Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and lots of factories opening in the early 1900s, but heavy-duty industrial and medical revolution has happened just since WWII, for the most part.
So out of that ENTIRE description of the history of the universe, 13.7 billion years, only EIGHTY years have included the technological world we know. And it really only exists in the West and East Asia, though other regions have their fair shares.
Do you think the modern world we live in will exist for thousands and thousands of years, to make a big mark on the timeline of the universe? Or will a big atomic war or climate change stop that within the next 50 years?
Does the world as we know it make it to beyond a blip on the overall universe's timeline?
So out of that ENTIRE description of the history of the universe, 13.7 billion years, only EIGHTY years have included the technological world we know. And it really only exists in the West and East Asia, though other regions have their fair shares.
Do you think the modern world we live in will exist for thousands and thousands of years, to make a big mark on the timeline of the universe? Or will a big atomic war or climate change stop that within the next 50 years?
Does the world as we know it make it to beyond a blip on the overall universe's timeline?
