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Time

Humans have existed for only a brief moment of the Earth's full life span.

A PDF version of this exhibit is also available.

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For Earth events, see Canup and Asphaug 1, Chow 2, Hoffman et al. 3, Kasting 4, Li et al. (2008) 5, Mathewson 6, O'Malley-James et al. 7, Perlman 8, Scotese 9, Ward and Brownlee 10, Wit 11, Zhao et al. 12, and Zubritsky 13. For Life events, see Bell et al. 14, Bengtson et al. 15, Butterfield 16, Franck et al. 17, Li et al. (2009) 18, Luhmann et al. 19, Lyons et al. 20, Ohtomo et al. 21. For Animals events, see Cunningham et al. 22, Normile 23, O'Malley-James et al. 7, Rubenstein et al. 24, Ward 25, and our review of Earth's mass extinctions. For Hominid events, see Berna et al. 26, Haile-Selassie 27, and Harmand et al. 28. For homo sapiens events, see Bar-Yosef 29 and Schlebusch et al. 30. Potential future events are discussed in AI Multiple 31, Kimball 32, IRENA 33, Li and Zhao 34, O'Neill 35, and Reedy 36, and our population analysis. Far future events are discussed in the Coffey 37, Department of the Interior 38, IPCC 39, Frölicher 40, MIT 41, Niagara Parks 42, Stager 43. For future energy forecast, see our analysis entitled Global Primary Energy Consumption by Category 44. The first subatomic particle collider 45. First commercial laser 46. First space station 47. First synthetic plastic 48. First (commercial & hand-held) mobile phone 49. First commercial LED 50. First handheld electronic calculator 51. Safety bicycle 52. Atlatl + Bow & Arrow 53. First GMO commercial product 54. First computer network 55. First liquid fueled rocket 56. Invention of photography (first photograph from a camera) 57. First ISO standard on containerization 58. First programmable industrial robot 59. First PC GUI 60, 61. First coal-fired power plant (opened on January 12th, 1882) 62, 63. First hydroeletric power plant (opened on September 30th, 1882) 64. First commercially viable refrigerator 65. First power loom patented 66. First patented metal ball bearings 67.

References for other events are readily found in reference materials.

A PDF version of this exhibit is also available.


References

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  2. Chow, D. "The African continent is very slowly peeling apart. Scientists say a new ocean is being born". NBC News. July 2020. ↩

  3. Hoffman P., Abbot D., Ashkenazy Y., Benn D., Brocks J., Cohen P., Cox G., Creveling J., Donnadieu Y., Erwin D., Fairchild I. "Snowball Earth climate dynamics and Cryogenian geology-geobiology". Science Advances 1(3): e1600983. November 2017. ↩

  4. Kasting, J. "Runaway and moist greenhouse atmospheres and the evolution of Earth and Venus". Icarus 74(3), pp. 472-494. June 1988. ↩

  5. Li, Z., Bogdanova, S., Collins, A., Davidson, A., Da Waele, B., Ernst, R., Fitzsimons, I., Fuck, R., Gladkochup, D., Jacobs, J., Karlstrom, K., Lu, S., Natapov, L., Pease, V., Pisarevsky, S., Thrane, K., Vernikovsky, V. "Assembly, configuration, and break-up history of Rodinia: A synthesis". Precambrian Research 160(1-2), pp. 179-210. January 2008. ↩

  6. Mathewson, S. "Earth Will Have Its Last Total Solar Eclipse in About 600 Million Years". Space.com. July 2017. ↩

  7. O'Malley-James J., Greaves J., Raven JA. Cockell C. "Swansong biospheres: refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes". arXiv preprint arXiv:1210.5721. October 2012. ↩ ↩2

  8. Perlman, D. "Kiss that Hawaiian timeshare goodbye / Islands will sink in 80 million years". San Francisco Chronicle. October 2016. ↩

  9. Scotese, C. "Late Proterozoic plate tectonics and palaeogeography: a tale of two supercontinents, Rodinia and Pannotia". Geological Society, London, Special Publications 326(1):67. 2009. ↩

  10. Ward, P., Brownlee, D. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Springer Science & Business Media. December 2003. ↩

  11. Wit, D. "Vaalbara, Earth’s oldest assembled continent? A combined structural, geochronological, and palaeomagnetic test". Terra Nove 10(5), pp. 250-259. September 1998. ↩

  12. Zhao, G., Cawood, P., Wilde, S., Sun, M. "Review of global 2.1–1.8 Ga orogens: implications for a pre-Rodinia supercontinent". Earth-Science Reviews 59(1-4), pp. 125-162. November 2002. ↩

  13. Zubritsky, E. "In the beginning, there was Ur". Endeavors, UNC-Chapel Hill. May 1997. ↩

  14. Bell, E., Boehnke, P., Harrison, T., Mao, W. "Potentially biogenic carbon preserved in a 4.1 billion-year-old zircon". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112(47), pp. 14518-14521. October 2015. ↩

  15. Bengtson S., Rasmussen B., Ivarsson M., Muhling J., Broman C., Marone F., Stampanoni M., Bekker A. "Fungus-like mycelial fossils in 2.4-billion-year-old vesicular basalt". Nature Ecology & Evolution 1(6), pp. 1-6. April 2017. ↩

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  18. Li, K., Pahlevan, K., Kirschvink, J., Yung, Y. "Atmospheric pressure as a natural climate regulator for a terrestrial planet with a biosphere". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106(24), pp. 9576-9579. June 2009. ↩

  19. Luhmann, J., Johnson, R., Zhang, M. "Evolutionary impact of sputtering of the Martian atmosphere by O+ pickup ions". Geophysical Research Letters 19(21), pp. 2151-2154. November 1992. ↩

  20. Lyons, T., Reinhard, C., Planavsky, N. "The rise of oxygen in Earth’s early ocean and atmosphere". Nature 506, pp. 307-315. February 2014. ↩

  21. Ohtomo, Y., Kakegawa, T., Ishida, A., Nagase, T., Rosing, M. "Evidence for biogenic graphite in early Archaean Isua metasedimentary rocks". Nature Geoscience 7, pp. 25-28. 2014. ↩

  22. Cunningham, J., Liu, A., Bengtson, S., Donoghue, P. "The origin of animals: Can molecular clocks and the fossil record be reconciled?". BioEssays 39(1), pp. 1-2. January 2017. ↩

  23. Normile, D. "The world’s first trees grew by splitting their guts". Science Magazine. October 2017. ↩

  24. Rubenstein, C., Gerrienne, P., de la Puente, G., Astini, R., Steemans, P. "Early Middle Ordovician evidence for land plants in Argentina (eastern Gondwana)". New Phytologist 188(2):365-9. August 2010. ↩

  25. Ward, P. The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World. Macmillan. 2004. ↩

  26. Berna, F., Goldberg, P., Horwitz, L., Brink, J., Holt, S., Bamford, M., Chazan, M. "Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109(20), pp. E1215-E1220. May 2012. ↩

  27. Haile-Selassie, Y. "Phylogeny of early Australopithecus: new fossil evidence from the Woranso-Mille (central Afar, Ethiopia)". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365(1556):3323-31. October 2010. ↩

  28. Harmand, S. et al. "3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya". Nature 521, pp. 310–315. May 2015. ↩

  29. Bar-Yosef, O. "The Upper Paleolithic Revolution". Annual Review of Anthropology 31, pp. 363-393. October 2002. ↩

  30. Schlebusch C., Malmström H., Günther T., Sjödin P., Coutinho A., Edlund H., Munters A., Vicente M., Steyn M., Soodyall H., Lombard M. "Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago". Science 358(6363), pp. 652-655. November 2017. ↩

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  32. Kimball, W. "When Will We Have Designer Babies?". Gizmodo. November 2017. ↩

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  34. Li, C., Zhao, W. "Progress in the brain–computer interface: an interview with Bin He". National Science Review 7(2), pp. 480-483. February 2020. ↩

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