I stumbled upon a fantastic post on waitbutwhy.com about putting time in perspective. It’s a visual representation of time that really gets you thinking about how small our sliver actually is.
To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which).  All timeline lengths are exactly accurate to the amount of time they’re expressing.
One of my favorites is that the Pyramids were more ancient to the ancient Romans than the Romans are to us.
Anyway, let me give you a couple other things to think about on time scale. During the expansion phase of the Big Bang — the first couple seconds or so — the forces which define our universe, like weak nuclear, electromagnetic, gravitation, and so forth, were entirely irrelevant. The other forces just drowned them out.
They must have had an INCREDIBLE amount of interaction, and therefore pattern-forming. On an INCREDIBLY rapid scale.
Now, life is what happens when a pattern of something exists which happens to make copies of itself using resources in the environment. It’s entirely possible that, at some point in that smashing together of all the matter and energy that exists in the universe today, except much, much closer and able to interact with everything much more, “life” formed. And evolved. And developed intelligence.
Imagine entire societies rising up in those first few milliseconds. And their scientists studying the universe. And pointing out that the universe was expanding, and, at some point in the unimaginably distant future, seconds or even MINUTES later, the universe was basically going to be dead and cold and spread out forever and ever, with no life ever again.
That’s the universe WE live in. And it turns out that there IS life. On such an unimaginably long scale that the time it takes me to type one letter is far, far longer than the time that it took life to rise, become intelligent, and have entire societies, at the BEGINNING Of the big bang.
This is all speculation, imagination, stuff that can never be tested. But I like to think that’s what happened.
And we’re discovering some evidence that there MIGHT be forces in the universe that work on much slower, longer, weaker scales than even gravity. Perhaps, after the universe appears to reach its heat death to US, there will still be forces going on — and, at some unimaginably distant point in the future, there will be some creature speculating that, back in the time of the first few billion years of the Big Bang, back before physics was anything like THEY can imagine, there were creatures, speculating about the universe, whose entire species rose and died in less that the time that it took that creature to express the smallest fraction of that thought.
We should of course always be grateful for the life we live, regardless of its size in comparison to other measures of time. But, to me, this article was a small reminder that we pretty much won the galactic lottery, which further motivates me to savor every bit of joy in my wee (wheeee!) lifetime.
