Sciolist

Cosmic Calendar : Universe in a year

My friend Sajid was repeatedly asking me to watch Cosmos. Cosmos was a television series once and now it is available as a collection of DVDs. This week I rented the whole series of COSMOS from the library and watched the first 2 parts (one DVD). Actually there are 7 DVDs in this series. Each DVD has 2 parts.

I am amazed to hear about this Cosmic Calendar. Imagine that the history of the universe is compressed into one year—with the big bang occurring in the first seconds of New Year’s Day, and all our known history occurring in the final seconds before midnight on December 31. Using this scale of time, each month would equal a little over a billion years. Here’s a closer look at when important events would occur when we imagine the universe in one year. As the image given in this post is distorted, please use the original link to view the images.

Pay close attention to the fact that modern humans appeared only around 11:54PM of the last day of the calendar. This shows our part in the universe. Within this limited period of time human beings had done a lot of innovations and discoveries. What if there is another planet in this universe and there are creatures (like human beings or of any other unimaginable shape) that have evolved long before humans appeared in the universe?

Also I am stumped by the fact that before 2200 years someone has proved that world is a sphere and he has also more or less calculated the circumference of the Earth. His name is Eratosthenes. Carl Sagan also introduces a library. And also if he could time travel, he would wish to go to this place. Carl Sagan also states that this library had more than million scrolls (not books!) and all of them were destroyed and what remains now are few moldering shelves.

Carl Sagan points out an important thing from this library’s destruction. For example, we know that in this library there existed a book by the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos who apparently argued that earth is one of the planets that revolve around the sun and the stars are enormously far away. All of these facts are absolutely true, but we had to wait for 2000 years before we rediscover them. All good and hard work done by those astronomers were destroyed for nothing. What if those discoveries were not destroyed? We would have moved far beyond our current innovations and discoveries in astronomy.

Humans should be careful (and tolerate) enough that this mistake does not happen in the future.