23:59:59.000000000000
31 December · you are here
1 Jan1 Jul31 Dec
1 second= 437 years
1 hour= 1.57 million years
1 day= 37.8 million years
1 month= 1.15 billion years
13.8 billion years ago
1 January · 00:00
The Big Bang
Everything that has ever existed begins as a point smaller than a full stop. Within three minutes the first atoms form. The year has started.
13.4 billion years ago
11 January
The first stars ignite
Gravity pulls hydrogen into knots until they catch fire. Every atom in your body heavier than helium was cooked inside one of these furnaces.
11 billion years ago
16 March
The Milky Way takes shape
Our galaxy assembles itself from smaller ones. It will be another five and a half months before it has anything worth calling a planet in this story.
4.5 billion years ago
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 happens in the last four months.
4.4 billion years ago
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.
4.2 billion years ago
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.
2.4 billion years ago
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 extinction — and it made everything that followed possible.
540 million years ago
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.
420 million years ago
12 December
Life crawls onto land
Plants first, then the animals that eat them. The continents stop being bare rock.
252 million years ago
22 December
The Great Dying — the 3rd mass extinction
The worst day in the history of life. Around 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates are wiped out. It took life ten million years to recover.
225 million years ago
25 December
The dinosaurs arrive
They turn up on Christmas Day and stay for six days — an unimaginably successful reign that makes the whole of human history look like a rounding error.
200 million years ago
27 December
Insects, birds and a breaking world
Birds take to the air and insects diversify. The single supercontinent begins tearing itself apart into the map we know today — Africa and South America still fit together like a torn photograph.
65 million years ago
30 December
The 5th mass extinction
An asteroid ends it. Not just the dinosaurs — 75% of all life on Earth dies. The survivors inherit an empty planet, and one group of small, warm, furry things takes full advantage.
60 million years ago
30 December
The age of mammals
Mammals had been scurrying about for a hundred million years waiting for a gap. They get it, and fill it, in a matter of hours.
10 million years ago
31 December · 17:39
Our ape ancestor appears
Six hours ago. Everything that has ever been called human is younger than a working day.
250,000 years ago
31 December · 23:50
Modern humans evolve
Ten minutes to midnight. In Africa — which is where every single person alive today comes from, without exception.
12,000 years ago
31 December · 23:59:33
Farming, and the first cities
Twenty-seven seconds before midnight, humans stop following food and start growing it. Everything we call civilisation fits into the last half-minute of the year.
2,000 years ago
31 December · 23:59:55
Religion, empire and written history
Five seconds. Every god, every scripture, every war fought over them, every king and every country — all of it happens in the last five seconds of the year.
250 years ago
31 December · 23:59:59.4
The Industrial Revolution
Six tenths of a second before midnight, we learn to burn what took the planet 300 million years to bury. The graph of everything — population, temperature, extinction — turns vertical.
the last 200 years
31 December · 23:59:59.5
The 6th mass extinction begins
Half a second. Species are now disappearing between 100 and 1,000 times faster than the natural background rate. No asteroid this time. This one has a cause that can read.
now
31 December · Midnight
Midnight. You are here.
You have been alive for roughly two tenths of one Universe second. The question the book asks is simple: what would you do differently if you could actually see the clock?
Look at what that calendar actually shows. The Universe existed for two-thirds of the year before Earth even formed. Life spent a month as pond scum. The dinosaurs — the great symbol of ancient, unimaginable time — only turned up on Christmas Day.
And us? Every cave painting, every pyramid, every empire, every prophet, every war, every invention, every person you have ever loved or hated: all of it happens in the last five seconds of the year.
That is not a reason to feel small. It is a reason to look at what we have managed to do to the place in half of one second.