“The whole universe was in a hot dense state. Then, nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started. Wait…”

That’s the opening theme song of our favorite comedy series, the Big Bang Theory.

I did not care how long this “14 billion years” span of time until someone told me that we are at very close to the New Year countdown if we put the history of the universe into the scale of a year. Then, I started thinking, doing some research, and plotting the timeline on my excel spreadsheet.

Then I realized how little we know about the history, and how ignorant I had been.

I am not going to layout everything but I want you to see some of the key events below:

Years ago…	In 1yr scale	Events
13,800,000,000	Jan 1	the Big Bang
4,600,000,000	May	the birth of the sun (our solar system)
4,540,000,000		the birth of the earth
245,000,000	Dec 25	appearance of dinosaur on the earth
66,000,000	Dec 30	Chicxulub impact (that killed the dinosaur)
800,000		appearance of homo sapiens
10,000	Dec 31 @23:37	emergence of civilization (like Mesopotamia and other)
2,000	Dec 31 @23:59:55	the birth of Jesus Christ
500	Dec 31 @23:59:59	Christopher Columbus voyage
100		the World War
15		the 1st generation of iPhone
2		COVID pandemic

_{***I just cut and pasted the info from various sources on the internet so it would not be the super accurate info but I think you get the idea… Also, the events that I picked are random without any subtext or whatsoever… The intention here is just to show the scale of the time.}

Let’s try a quick arithmetic to apply 1 year scale to this history.

13.8 billion years / 365 days = 37.8 million years

>>> Dec 31 @ 01:00 = it is after the Chicxulub impact but long before the emergence of homo sapiens.

37.8 million years / 24 hours = 1.6 million years

>>> Dec 31 @ 23:00 = … homo sapiens have not appeared yet…

1.6 million years / 60 minutes = 26 thousand years ago

>>> Dec 31 @ 23:59 = … 16 thousand years to go until the beginning of the human civilization…

Dec 31@23:59, that is a minute before the year ends and no human civilization yet!
I did a different calculation and what I got is that Jesus Christ was born 4.6 seconds ago, Christopher Columbus voyaged around the world a second ago, and the World War happened, computer became a household item, internet boosted, and iPhones came out in less than a second!

I think you got the idea of this enormously history of the universe but do not forget that there must have been something else before the Big Bang. I have no idea what is out there but the scale of the timeline just makes me dizzy!

My question is what was going on on Thanksgiving Day or Halloween? On earth, on Mars, or on a planet in a different solar system. Are we really the first civilization on earth? Are we really the only one in the Universe?

I would probably not get the answer to this question in my life time but I enjoy stretching my imagination.