The Cosmic Calendar

Introduction

The age of the universe is 13.787 billion years. Cosmologic time is difficult for most of us to grasp. So how are we going to comprehend cosmologic time? Why not compress all of the universe's history into just a single year?

The cosmic calendar is a method to visualize the history of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.787 billion years to one Earth year (365 days) in order to help make the cosmological timescale easier to understand. The Geologic Calendar (we'll learn more about that a few articles later) is a similar analogy used to visualize the geologic time scale and the history of life on Earth.

In this visualization, the Big Bang created the universe on New Year's Day (January 1) at midnight, and the present time is represented by midnight at the end of New Year's Eve (December 31). Both the Big Bang and the present are represented  by midnight at either end of the year. As we'll see, compressing 13.787 billion years into just a 365 day year causes calendar time to speed up A LOT. At this scale:

• 1 second ~ 438 years

• 1 minute ~ 26,280 years

• 1 hour ~ 1.58 million years

• 1 day ~ 37.8 million years

The Calendar

Cosmology

Evolution of life on Earth

Human evolution

History begins

Future

Future of Earth and the Solar System ("Year 2")

Future of the Universe ("Year 3" and beyond)