Author Topic: A Brief Time Rewind and On Technology  (Read 812 times)

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Offline Immediacracy

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A Brief Time Rewind and On Technology
« on: May 05, 2010, 06:25:35 PM »
A Very Brief (but still not brief enough) History of Time

If there was a time machine that could rewind one century of history back per forward moving second and you started this rewind at 12:00:00 noon on Jan 1, 2010:

You could expect to see the Wright brothers fly at 12:00:01.

During the next second your grandparents grandparents maybe lived in the Civil War era, and their great grandparents lived when Thomas Jefferson took office as third US President.

In three more rewind seconds Mozart, Bach, Isaac Newton, Shakespeare, DesCartes, Galileo, Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Copernicus, DaVinci, Michelangelo live and Columbus explores the new world...

The Dark Ages last about 9 or 10 seconds during which there are lots of religious wars and death. Highlights include the Black Death, which wipes out a third of Europe (1347-1349) and the Crusades. There are Byzantines, Normans, Franks, Turks, Mongols, Huns, Goths,Vandals, etc invading and migrating.

Between 16 and 28 seconds you would witness the fall and rise of 'Classical' civilization (Iron Age) including the lives of both JC's (Julius and Jesus), Alexander the Great, Confucius, Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Pythagoras, Isaiah, Zoroaster, and Homer.

After 12 more seconds of rewinding through the Bronze Age, Stonehenge is built about 2000 BCE or 12:00:40 R (Rewind). Rewinding five or six more seconds the first pyramids are built in Egypt.You could say that all of civilization dating back to the dawn of agriculture (Neolithic period) would pass in under two minutes (11,000 years).

Between 12:05:00 and 12:06:00 modern Homo Sapiens replace the Neandertals in Europe. At 12:20:00 Homo Sapiens leave Africa and begin to spread throughout the world. Homo Sapiens and Neandertals appear at 12:33:19 R towards the end of the last ice age (Upper Paleolithic)*
*According to the mitochondrial DNA geeks "Eve" is born around this time in Africa.

There is a lot of controversy over what happens during the next seven R hours (2.5 million years), what did Homo do and when and where did they do it...that sort of thing. It is thought that at 1:23:17 R, Hominids began using fire, and at 2:46:12 the first stone tools appear, and by 5:30 or 6pm the first wave of hominids (not H. Sapiens mind you) leave Africa but fail to survive a half dozen or so ice ages of various duration.

By 11:00 pm, our earliest hominid ancestor (four million year old Austalopithicus Anamensis, recently discovered) first walks on two legs, probably adapting to the climactic changes which transformed the African forest to open-plain savanna. Sometime between 2:00 am and 12:00:00 Noon January 2, 2010  our distant relatives diverged from a common primate ancestor which we share with the Chimpanzee.

You would need to rewind for about eight days to get back to the demise of the dinosaurs (65 million yrs ago) who would dominate the Earth for two more R weeks. Within the R month of January you would see the first flowers, birds, reptiles, fish, and forests develop.

By 8:00 AM February 20th (435 mya), you would pass the point beyond which no creature yet walked on land. On March 8 the Cambrian 'explosion' (first proliferation of fossils - think trilobites) is the last interesting thing for an entire Pre-Cambrian R year until January 17, 2011 - the dawn of life on Earth (about 4 billion years ago). That's 3.4 billion out of 4 billion years of life where living things might have only consisted of algae and such in the ocean.*
*If there were any other complex living organisms they were pretty squishy and didn't leave much behind.

The Earth itself formed only another 600 million years earlier, so you would have to rewind until say June 2011 to see it. The Sun is estimated to be 4.76 billion years old, putting it's appearance one week after the Earth.*
*however most of the atoms Earth is made of must have been forged beforehand in other larger stars and supernovas.

To get to the big bang you'd have to wait in the time machine until at least 2014...14 billion years ago.

Enjoy the rest of your fraction of a second!


On Technology:

The internet is a telephone system for computers
computers are calculators attached to TV's
TV is radio with a fluorescent screen
radio is a wireless telegraph
telegraph with microphones is a telephone
A telephone network is an industrial scale calculator

Microelectronics are miniature suburbs.
Suburbs are transportation systems for cars.
Cars are personal locomotives.
Locomotives are engines on wheels.
Engines are miniature factories whose product is motion.
Factories are urban macroprocessors.

« Last Edit: May 05, 2010, 07:49:37 PM by Immediacracy »
"That which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe."
- John Archibald Wheeler