Like others, I liked the loop-back to today. I think it would be nice to include decade before century. Also, more or less at/after "period" I started to get a little bored (see the discussion in these comments about losing perspective) UNTIL you added the second dimension about life itself and then it got interesting again because we think of dinosaurs and such to be so, so, so long ago and yet this animation shows that in the grand scheme of things, it's as if it had been last week.
Including those additional segments helped maintain perspective for me -- seeing each one shrink incrementally gave a better sense than one animation from Holocene to all of Earth's history.
I've always wanted to do something like that! It's brilliant. You should add "here is your grand-grand mother, what's her name?" and "here will be your potential grand grand son, do you think they'll remember your name?"
Out of interest, what country are you from? I'm curious at the fact you called it 'grand-grand'. Here in Australia we use 'great grand(mother etc.)'. Must be a cultural thing.
Same here. These sort of time scales should really make us humble and question the meaning of "making a dent in the universe" or taking our legacies too seriously.
This is the first time I've seen something online that really made me go "Wow! I want to make something like this too!"
And since I felt so strongly about this reaction, I messaged the guy behind the site (Luke Twyman) saying "Thanks for the inspiration!"
It's quite a feeling being (a) inspired by something that you just bump into one day, and (b) being able to shoot the guy/gal behind it telling him/her how much you enjoyed their stuff. It's always a great feeling getting positive feedback for some of my blog articles, and I'm strangely feeling perhaps just as positive and cheery for giving such a thumbs up to someone!
THE Haruki? If so, I read your book on running yesterday! What a wonderful coincidence. I was also very inspired (inspirational ripple going on here..) and decided to run every day instead of just every other day. Great read!
Edit: went to your website and found out, no, you're not Haruki Murakami. Sorry for confusing you with him!
This reminded me of something I saw at the Science Museum in London a few years ago.
A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear.
I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment in the overall scale of the earth's history. (I don't know if the exhibit is still there)
There's a growing academic discipline called "Big History"[1] that attempts to examine all of history from the big bang to the present. Bill Gates sponsors a project to teach a free public course to high school students[2].
One of the first couple of episodes of Cosmos (maybe the first?) has a similar thing to convey the scale of time in our existence in the universe. Pretty cool.
Rather than place the present day at midnight on the clock, how about placing the present day on the current value given by the Doomsday Clock [1]. Then, with a little arithmetic, you can label midnight with the projected date of Doomsday :)
Isn't that (loosing yourself in the grand scheme of things) the whole point of the animation ? A bit like Power of Ten [1] and Scale of the Universe [2] but with time instead of space.
The problem with this one is that you actually don't lose yourself. Today remains highlighted and continues to occupy a pixel or two. Even the millennium vanishes next to epochs to preserve our bookmark on today. It's jarring, and completely ruined the effect for me.
I don't know what tzaman was saying exactly, but what I noticed was that "today" got down to one or two pixels pretty fast, while the larger and larger time periods were restricted to only another ~1000 pixels or so, so at some point you have to shift back to imagining the relative lengths of time in your head again, instead of seeing e.g. "today" as 1/30 of the month.
I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but for me the most striking point was when it circled back to today. It was a reminder that in that grand scheme of things, there's some stuff you do control. Now, time to get that stuff I was planning to do done.
Single crystal uranium-lead dating is one of the best all-around methods and gets used a lot for vanilla geological applications of Earth rocks; any rock that contains trace amounts of the mineral "zircon" can be dated with this technique. Zircon is special because it tends to incorporate a lot of uranium when it crystallizes while excluding lead. As time passes after the zircon crystal cools, uranium decays into radiogenic lead, and by measuring the relative abundance of these two things in the crystal we can estimate the time since that zircon crystallized (with no lead inside) and get an "age" that tells us how long it has been since that zircon crystal was formed. Zircon is common in many types of igneous rocks, which are rocks that began in a molten state. The zircon crystals in an igneous rock are resistant to weathering (compared to feldspars, another common igneous constituent), so sometimes they end up as grains in sedimentary rocks and we can use a variation on the technique called "detrital zircon geochronology" to estimate the age of sedimentary deposits.
Other systems (like samarium-neodymium) are most often used when trying to date things older than the Earth, e.g. meteorites.
Carbon dating is actually only effective up to about 50,000 years, so its really only ideal for tracking human history after we started migrating out of Africa. This is because the unstable carbon-14 isotope only has a half-life of about 5700 years.
There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ago.
Note: I'm not a geologist. I remembered that carbon was only effective for a few thousand years from a geology course I had in college, but all of this information is actually taken from articles on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
Due to the way radiometric dating works, you don't need to actually verify in the way that you are using the word. However, there are at least two ways to verify the date:
1) Verify the half-life value. Radiometric dating works on the same principle: look at the ratio of pre-substance to fissioned substance. If you have a good half-life value, you can determine the age of the specimen using those values.
2) Use two different methods for getting the same age. If you use multiple, independent methods of determining the age of something, and they all come out the same, you have greatly lessened the probability that you're wrong or missed something.
Of course there are ways that these can be strengthened even more using practices like double blinding the measurements.
The best way I know to "check" radiometric ages is to date a rock using more than one isotopic system (e.g. K-Ar and U-Pb) and compare the ages that you get. If you get the same age from isotope systems with different decay rates and systematics, that is strong evidence that your technique is working.
People have done this many times, and most of the error comes from different levels of uncertainty in the decay constants from one system to another. Many of the decay constants have not been updated for decades (e.g. Steiger and Jager 1977) and are suspected to be a few percent off, but the people who are qualified to make such measurements (physicists + chemists) aren't the people who want to use them in applications (geochronologists and geochemists). So the incentives aren't aligned and I doubt anyone will ever fix them.
Note: Was a geology/geophysics PhD student until recently.
It's more like a , you might get killed by a car if you step into the street kind of theoretical. Or the drip of a water clock will fill the container in 8 hours kind of theoretical. Or a don't plant too early or your people will starve kind of theoretical.
A theory in science is a model backed by the huge majority of observational evidence and the collective experience of the model's community. There are no other equivalent human institutions for reliability. None.
So saying "it's just a theory" in the case of uranium-dating is a fairly unreasoned attitude.
This actually isn't made with D3. If you look at http://hereistoday.com/today.js, it is all done in Canvas. Their code is fairly well commented, so start by reading through that. At the same time, Google around how to use Canvas for animation.
How it works: they bind the getPosition function the mousedown event, which in turn starts the appropriate draw function. They have 19 frames, each of which has its own draw function that draws rectangles. Every 1000/FPS seconds, the the update and beginDraw functions are called, which are responsible for tween effect.
What I find funny, is how the visualization of scale on a pixel based screen is inherently limiting.
At a certain point, you want to represent today as a scale of everything else...but at certain point, the line for today would definitely be smaller than a single pixel.
Just a thought, obviously this is not practical by any measure.
very nice, however "today" always remains one pixel in width, which kinda breaks the comparison on larger time frames. I would also maybe add another step, like this decade. still really nice!
The appropriate trick here would be to change the point of reference each time you zoom out. At the millennium scale, the point of reference might become this year. At the epoch scale, the point of reference might become the millennium.
This is great. My only suggestion is to increase the font size on the timeline labels. They were too small for me to read, even with my eyes right up to the monitor.
"Many moons have risen and fallen long,
long before you came.
So which way is the wind blowin',
and what does your heart say?
So follow, follow the sun,
and which way the wind blows
when this day is done."
Yeah, I like this, but it becomes less effective as the scale increases. At "Here is the Earth", the line for Today should be invisible (certainly not the same width as in "Here is this century"). It demonstrates the limits of this kind of explicitly visual approach.
By contrast, language, which leverages the imagination, can be even more effective at revealing how insignificant we are:
"...stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire [4.5 Billion year] history of the Earth. On this scale...the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, 'and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.' " (from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Another example of language illustrating an abstract concept better than visual/graphic design: If you filmed or animated the following thought-experiment, would it render it any more effective?
"Imagine people's height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.
The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America's median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall."
What I find most interesting is that the dawn of anatomically modern humans is actually visible on the 4.54 billion year timeline of the Earth. 200,000 years out of 4.54 billion might only be about 1/23000 of our planet's history, but that's also a whole 1/23000!
If the period of time that humans have been around was drawn to scale, it wouldn't really be visible.
If we assume that the width of the bar for the life of the earth is 1500 pixels (the width changes depending on the window size), then the period we have been around will be around 0.06 pixels wide (1500/23000 = 0.065). Much closer to zero pixels than one pixel.
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Thanks! I like these scales, how small the Earth is, how young humanity is.
But once someone starts preaching about how this means we are insignificant I lose interest quickly.
If we are the only sentient life in the universe, then we are extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. If there was/is a god or another alien civilization from another universe, they would certainly conclude that the evolution of sentient life is one of the top ten wonders of this universe.
I get tired of all this "insignificant" talk, its simply not true. Our minds are perhaps behind the wonder of life in the first place, but not that far behind, and life is one of the greatest things about our universe. How inanimate material started to think and move and do things. I think that is in no way insignificant, even if life only exists for a fraction of the time the universe will exist.
I guess what I wrote is entirely subjective, I wonder how many people would agree or disagree with my statement, or at least my feeling towards how others would view our sentience and life in general?
I really don't think humanity and life is insignificant even when we are small in comparison to giant stars and distances and short-lived in comparison to the age of the universe.
I think the main assumption you're making is that we represent the pinnacle of anything. Whether or not it's true, I think the exercise of seeing how small today is vis-a-vis how large it feels contains an analogous insight: the vastness of what was and what will be is so incomprehensible that it would be shortsighted to ascribe any kind of superlative significance to what's here now.
People who say humanity is the summit of some mountain might as well be saying "we are living in the newest day to ever have happened." Technically true, but far from certain that it means anything. Personally, I think it behooves the character of humanity to sit quietly in humility.
An eon from now, when the technological lifeforms which have succeeded recall instantly this thread from their archive, and witness how you once crowed about the grandness of humanity, they may experience an emotion which you might call humor -- only with a dimension and richness that your mind cannot possibly fathom. Or they may experience disdain, contempt, and ridicule at the thought that you had anything to do with them or their existence. Do you credit the millionth timid mammal, your potential forebear, for surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction? Of course not -- not unduly at least -- it was only doing what was assigned to it, a biological directive.
And you consider the mind so great, which we scarcely understand -- to direct your own mind toward the contemplation of its grandness seems, at least, arrogant. If you should live so long, in your own lifetime it will not only decay, but before that it will trick you, deceive you and trap you. And soon, it will also be made obsolete. What did it do in between that was so great? Gamify some social metrics to increase ROI and user engagement? Contemplate and slightly reduce the runtime complexity of an algorithm whose need will be eliminated within a decade? Eat, sleep, shit and fuck?
So I'm not sure what exactly you mean by calling us significant, you don't know that at all. The statement means less than calling today the youngest day to ever have happened, because at least that is true.
In sum: all that you consider to be esteemable and worthy of elevation will be reduced with time. Whatever significance you imagine it holds is a function of another observer who -- if it exists -- is driven by motives and a character you don't understand.
Or in other words, just live today; it won't matter in the grand scheme of things. And likely, neither will humanity.
.. and here is us, destroying millions of years life, in what is a split of a second in comparison. We are undertaking the greatest mass extinction of all times.
99.99%+ of all life form that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. And it isn't because of Humans.
Think about that for a second: The universe is--gasp--actively trying to 'kill' life.
For us to undertake the greatest mass extinction of all times (that is to say, rival or exceed mass extinction caused by natural causes itself on Earth), we'd have to destroy at least--at least--another 10,000 Earth-like planets, each one replete with life as Earth is currently.
I would love to see Humans possess such amazing technological prowess one day[0], but alas, that will not be today, tomorrow, nor even this century.
[0] Wanting to see possession of technological capabilities does not imply I want to see future Humans use it to destroy extra-terrestrial planetary life.
They are indeed extinct, but spread over that time span. The "mass" in "mass extinction" come from the fact that a much greater # than usual are going extinct at the same time. Which is the case today. You may eat one burger a day for a long time. Which adds to a lot of burgers. In fact, 99.99% of all burgers you ate. But if you ate 100 burgers in one single day, I'd say something is wrong with you. Similarly, in a mass extinction, we are killing a great number of species, in a short amount of time, by completely altering the habitat/ecology of entire regions of Earth. Darwinian extinction on the other hand is driven by being out-competed by other species exploring the problem space, and long-term geological change.
