DESCRIPTION:
The Cosmic Calendar visualizes the chronology of the universe,
scaling approx. 13.8 billion years to one single year for perspective.
TRANSCRIPT:
This cosmic calendar compresses all of the last 13.8 billion years
since the Big Bang into a single calendar earthier. Every month is a little more
than a billion years every day a little less than 40 million a single hour is almost
2 million years that first day of the cosmic year began with the Big Bang.
Almost 14 billion years ago nothing really happened in our neck of the universe
until about 3 billion years later March 15th when our Milky Way galaxy began
to form 6 billion years after that power star the Sun was born.
It was August 31st on the cosmic calendar Jupiter and the other planets
including our own would soon follow. The atmosphere on earth was a toxic
environment for our kind of life then September 21st on the cosmic calendar
tiny creatures that could shove off the methane and eat carbon dioxide and
sunlight for breakfast found a way to make a living in the ocean by gobbling
up the carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen they turned the sky blue and then
the oxygenation of the atmosphere created the ozone layer for the first time
life was free to leave the oceans for the land now life could grow larger and
venture forth into New Territories. Sometime on December 26th about 200 million
years ago the first mammals evolved they brought a new feature to life on earth
the neocortex and then late on New Year's Eve a mutation occurred in the
DNA of just one of our ancestors one base pair of a single gene programmed
the neocortex to grow larger still maybe it was a random zap from a cosmic
ray or simple error in transmission from one cell to another whatever it was it
led to a change in our species that ultimately affect every other species of life
on earth by the last second of the cosmic year there was no place on earth
that we had left untouched all of it comes down to nothing more than a single
run on our tiny DNA ladder to the stars.
QUESTIONS:
1. What is the Cosmic Calendar?
2. Why are scientists so interested in finding out about the universe?
3. What do you think the edge of the universe looks like?
