Tag Archives: dinosaurs

Time warp

Have a look at this infographic:

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years, and disappeared in a mass extinction event 65 million years ago. Early hominids, the ancestors of early man only showed up 10 million years ago. If you were to draw a timeline from the first dinosaur to today, then the last surviving dinosaurs are closer in time to humans than they are to the first dinosaurs.

I don’t know why I grew up assuming that humans and dinosaurs co-existed long ago, but give me a break… I was only 55-60 million years off! Maybe it was drawings of humans and wooly mammoths? Maybe it was cartoons? But it’s a real time warp when you think about how long dinosaurs ruled the earth, and how short of a time humans have existed.

It’s even weirder to think of the time it took from the first steam engine to the time when our industrial lives started to threaten the well-being of our planet. Is this what intelligence life forms do? We’ve just been looking at time in millions of years, but the first steam engine was built just over 400 years ago.

Humans have been on this planet for such a short time, yet we place so much attention on ourselves and our significance, as conscious beings. This one species, on an insignificant planet, in an insignificant solar system, in an insignificant galaxy, at an insignificant time in the existence of the universe.

It’s time we got over ourselves.

Significantly Insignificant

As far as scientists know:

  • The human species originated in Africa about 250,000 to 300,000 years ago.
  • Dinosaurs existed for over 180,000,000 years.
  • Dinosaurs went extinct about 66,000,000 years ago.

To put this into perspective, as a percentage, humans have been around 0.167% as long as dinosaurs were. Put another way, dinosaurs existed for 600 times longer than humans have so far. Beyond that, dinosaurs have been extinct for 200 times longer than humans have been around.

We are a species that has lived for an insignificant amount of time, on a tiny planet, not far from an insignificant sun, in an insignificant part of our galaxy, which lies in an insignificant part of our universe. We are insignificant specs of cosmic dust.

Yet we are conscious, thinking and dreaming entities, who are creative, inventive, and future focused. It’s unlikely that we are the only beings capable of this in the universe, but it is likely we will be extinct before we meet any other beings as capable of thinking and creating like us… or destroying like us. To the earth, our cities are like parasites. We have created weapons of mass destruction. We consume natural resources at an alarming rate. We have caused the extinction of countless species. We have had a significant impact on our planet.

We are showing our significance in the ugliest of ways. Perhaps we should think about being a little more insignificant, because at this rate, it’s unlikely that we’ll be around as a species for any significant amount of time.

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