The uncomfortable calculator
On a calendar where the Big Bang is the 1st of January and this moment is midnight on the 31st of December, one second is 437 years. So a whole human life — childhood, career, family, everything — does not last a second.
Enter your date of birth. The number is small enough to be funny and big enough to be unsettling.
Now consider that the entire industrial age, every ton of carbon we have ever burned, and the whole of the sixth mass extinction fits into roughly half of one of those seconds.
Six hours ago. Everything ever called human is younger than a working day.
Ten minutes to midnight — and all of us out of Africa, without exception.
Five seconds holds every civilisation that has ever existed.