The last tenth of a millimeter
Now it really feels like spring, I hope the weather stays like this all year round, Guaymas would be a paradise. But I know that the heat will arrive in a very short time.
It's curious about time, I think we don't realize that the human time scale is something negligible, in fact the historical time scale is negligible.
Let's think a little, let's try to imagine that the 4,600 million years of history of the earth is one meter, 1000 mm. In that meter let's put transcendental events not so much in the history of the earth, but in the history of human beings.
At the zero millimeter the earth was formed, the next event that occurs to me would be the collision between the proto-earth and a proto-planet the size of Mars, with which we became the Earth-moon binary planetary system, that would be at the 22nd millimeter.
Life appears at millimeter 174 and photosynthesis at 239. The great oxidation caused by the accumulation of atmospheric O2 causes the earth to freeze at millimeter 500. Half a meter, the bugs barely appear and the earth freezes.
The first multicellular organisms appear at 675 mm and the first macroscopic organisms, from the Ediacara fauna, at 862 mm. Less than 14 cm is missing and we barely have the first macroscopic organisms.
The Cambrian revolution, the great explosion of diversity on the planet, arrives at mm 882. At mm 891 the first vertebrates appear and arthropods begin to populate the lands above the sea at mm 902 and terrestrial plants are established at mm 909. Less than 10 cm is left and the terrestrial ecosystems above the sea are just beginning to be populated.
Tetrapods, terrestrial vertebrates, appear at 922 mm, reptiles at 935 mm, and the “Great Dying”, the great extinction of the late Permian, occurs at 945 mm, 5.5 cm ago life on earth was about to end.
Mammals and dinosaurs appear in mm 950, we always think that mammals are later, but no, much of their history they lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs. Avian dinosaurs, where birds come from, appear at 967 mm. The asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, among other groups, was in mm 986. It was just a little less than a centimeter and a half ago and life on Earth almost ended again.
With the disappearance of the dinosaurs, mammals quickly began to diversify, around 987 mm, primates appeared. The first archaic humans separated from the great apes at 999 mm, just 1 mm ago.
The Australopithecus, the genus of the famous Lucy, appears at mm 999.1, the first stone tools around 999.5 mm. Homo erectus learns to handle fire at 999.8 mm, here, I believe, we can undoubtedly talk about humans, like us, just 0.2 mm ago.
We, Homo sapiens, appear at 999.9 mm. Think, all the history that they taught you in school, the domestication of species, the use of metals, all the kings, the empires, the expeditions, the wars, the scientific and technological discoveries, everything, absolutely everything that they taught you about history occurred in the last tenth of a millimeter of the earth's meter.
I believe that human beings give themselves a lot of importance, for me we are nothing more than presumptuous apes.
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