2 September
Planet Earth is formed
Read that again. The Universe had already been running for two thirds of the year before Earth existed at all. Everything you think of as history happ…
13.8 billion years · one calendar year · one minute left
You are six hours old.
If the entire history of the Universe were squeezed into a single year, Earth would only form in September, the dinosaurs would arrive on Christmas Day, and every human being who has ever lived would fit into the last ten minutes. Everything you have been taught to worry about happened after 23:59.
Scroll — the year is only just beginning
It is one second to midnight
23:59:59.000000000000
31 December · Universe Time
1 Jan — The Big Bang2 Sep — Earth31 Dec — You
This is the real position of the present moment on the Universe Time calendar. The digits below are not decoration — they are the amount of Universe Time that has passed since you opened this page.
437 yearsequals one Universe second
37.8 millionyears in a single Universe day
5 secondsthe whole of recorded history
0.000e+0 selapsed since you arrived
The year at a glance
Nothing is where you think it is
Six dates from the Universe Time calendar. Every one of them lands later in the year than almost anybody expects.
6 September
The Moon is born
A Mars-sized world slams into the young Earth. The debris becomes the Moon, which will go on to steady our seasons and make complex life possible.
9 September
Single-cell life appears in the oceans
Life gets going almost the moment the planet cools enough to allow it — and then does almost nothing new for the next month.
13 October
Bacteria invent oxygen
Cyanobacteria begin pumping out the waste gas we now call air. To most life alive at the time it was a poison. The Great Oxygenation was itself a mass…
5 December
The Cambrian explosion
In a geological blink the oceans fill with eyes, shells, jaws and legs. Almost every animal body plan alive today is invented in this fortnight.
12 December
Life crawls onto land
Plants first, then the animals that eat them. The continents stop being bare rock.
So how old are you, really?
Put your birthday on a 13.8 billion year clock
Put your date of birth in and find out what your entire life is worth on a 13.8 billion year clock. Fair warning: it is humbling.
Earth years—
Universe seconds—
Of all time, witnessed by you—
Your life fits into the dinosaurs' reign—
The argument
There have been five. This is the sixth.
Five times life on Earth has been very nearly erased — by ice, by volcanoes, by oxygen itself, and famously, 65 million years ago, by an asteroid that took 75% of everything alive with it.
The sixth began roughly two hundred years ago. In Universe Time that is less than half a second. The difference is that this one has a cause that can read, argue, vote and change its mind — which is either the most terrifying fact in the book, or the most hopeful one.
Species lost
Five extinctions, and the one we are in
The first five are the share of species lost. The sixth is the fall in monitored wild vertebrate populations since 1970 — and it is still climbing.
Ordovician445 million years ago · 21 Dec
85%
Devonian375 million years ago · 22 Dec
75%
Permian252 million years ago · 22 Dec
96%
Triassic200 million years ago · 27 Dec
80%
Cretaceous65 million years ago · 30 Dec
75%
The Sixththe last 200 years · 0.45 sec
68%
The book
The Sixth Extinction
The Sixth Extinction is not another book of graphs and guilt. It is an attempt to fix the one thing that stops people taking any of this seriously: we cannot feel deep time.
Nobody can picture a billion years. Everybody can picture a calendar. Universe Time turns 13.8 billion years into twelve months, and suddenly the argument becomes impossible to ignore.