http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/02/t...fe_in_60_se.php

 

Whoa! That last bit goes by pretty quickly. I sometimes wonder if time itself accelerates more quickly as the universe expands. The years sure seem to fly by now.

Of course that could just be a function of experiencing more of them.

 

Thanks...this was pretty neat.

 

Yeah, at first I was thinking "what is this? why don't they show a picture of the earth or something." Then I got it.

 

That was quick!

 

Very interesting.

 

Another way to look at this:

If we accept (for the sake of argument) that the meteorite strike that killed off most of the dinosaurs was 65.5 million years ago (this is the business about all the Iridium found in the sediments denoting the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary), then everything since that time happens in the video in its last 0.85 seconds or so. That's why it gets so busy at the end, of course.

What this means is that virtually all of the development of mammals and other modern plant and animal species (not to mention humans and our civilization) has occurred in that short time span. There are, of course, some ancient species, or very close relatives, still around (alligators, ferns, I think), but much of what's on Earth now has evolved since that event.

And what this means -- and what the video shows quite clearly -- is that there was lots and lots of time for evolutionary processes before the C-T extinction event to develop what was on Earth at that time. Even though we're not related to dinosaurs, there is lots of common DNA between us and, say, bananas -- meaning that recent evolution has been pretty easy compared to the initial stages of the development of life and complex life forms, which took all that 59.15 seconds of the video, representing Earth's first 4.5345 (of 4.6) billion years.

I think it may be this very long time scale problem, particularly relative to the 6,000 years that the Bible covers, that has the creationist crowd so confused. Confusion leads to a search for simple answers, so they turn to magical wand-waving by some unspecified "designer" for the explanation. The confusion, combined with the reality that humans are pretty trivial footnotes in the history of Earth (let alone the universe), makes for a very emotional topic that people take personally -- and they get personally threatened by alternative explanations, no matter now well documented. HPH

 

Pretty neat. The same comes to me when I consider that I Trillion heatbeats ago it was before the last Ice Age and the Neanderthals. All we know about human existence is nothing more than one speck of flysh*t in a pound of pepper.