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The Earth has been around for about 1/3 of the entire time the universe has existed.
Its extraordinary that at least on earth it took that long for life to develop that was intelligent enough to know this fact.
It literally took scales on the order of magnitude as the total time the universe has been existed to get where we are... sucks we are also on the verge of messing that all up.
@zleap To me when looking at things this way the fact that humans exist for only a fraction of the timeline is not particularly inciteful. That is true of every species on the timeline.
What is more impressive to me is that it took 4.5 billion years to produce the first life with our sort of intelligence. Plus it took only 1 billion years to for life to be created and then 3 billion more years just to go from single cell to multicellular.
The pace of evolution speeds up over time in a sense.
David Deutsch talks a lot about this aspect in "Beginning of infinity", very inspiring book
@freemo A persuasive argument has been made that there was a cognitive revolution in humans 70000 years ago that gave us the ability to have reached this conclusion. That is such a small interval on such unimaginable time scales.
Whenever I need an existential crisis I go to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe
@freemo Yeah, just looking at Twitter, it seems all sorts of things are kicking off in London at least,
I did read that if you put the history of the universe (or is it the earth?) on a clock face we have been here as humans for only a few seconds using that analogy.
Meanwhile China is rising, as are other countries, I think the west will soon be pretty much irrelevant. I say that because the west is simply collapsing as it can't handle it's own history and move forward.
Recent OU course on Living without Oil, cites that Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) are the rising economies, I think we add Africa to that now (BRICA),