In the beginning: Year 13 000 000 000
What better starting point could there be than the moment when
everything—all matter, energy, even space and time—exploded into
existence at a temperature of trillions of trillions of degrees. It immediately
began expanding and cooling. The cosmic clock had begun ticking.
A split second later came another milestone, when the cosmos decided that
matter, not antimatter, would reign. The Universe was born rich in antimatter,
but for every billion antiparticles, there were a billion and one particles of
matter. The matter and antimatter annihilated each other in a blaze of gamma
rays, and when the carnage was over, only matter remained. Some physicists
suspect that antimatter worlds might lurk in isolated corners of the Universe.
If they’re right, the first person to shake hands with an extraterrestrial might
get a hell of a surprise.
The shining Year: 12 999 700 000
At first, the Universe was so dense that light couldn’t travel through space.
Free electrons got in the way of photons and deflected them so that they
travelled crazy zigzag paths. It took 300 000 years for the cosmic fog to lift,
after the electrons finally became safely tucked up in atoms. Light started
streaming across the Universe. And matter, which was now freed from the tyranny
of radiation, began to clump together under gravity’s pull to form galaxies.
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Star turn-on: Year 12 000 000 000
After a long dark age, the stars switched on and started cooking up heavy
elements—such as carbon, oxygen and iron—that were essential for the
later emergence of life on Earth. Definitely something worth celebrating. The
subsequent deaths of the first generation of stars brought the first supernova
explosions and the first black holes.
Cheers!: Year 10 000 000 000
Yes, the world’s favourite intoxicant, ethanol, has been around a lot longer
than most people would expect. Icy grains, formed from material puffed into
space by the first generation of stars, provided the ideal site for some
interstellar chemistry. As large molecules formed on the surfaces of the grains,
starlight gave them enough energy to evaporate into space. Among these molecules
were methanol and ethanol. But the alcohol was spread rather thinly. Although
the newborn gas clouds would have contained more than 10 billion billion billion
litres of pure alcohol, filling a whisky glass would have meant trawling a
volume bigger than the yet-to-be-born Earth.
Hello world: Year 4 600 000 000
As the young Sun lit up the swirling disc of comet-sized chunks of debris
surrounding it, the gravity of the biggest pieces dragged more matter towards
them. One of these centres of attraction was orbiting 150 million kilometres
out: this was our planet, glowing cherry red under the intense bombardment that
had brought it into existence.
Violent birth: Year 4 500 000 000
The young Earth was in for a surprise. About 4.5 billion years ago, a body
bigger than Mars slammed into it, burrowing into its heart. The iron cores of
the two bodies merged, and the molten exterior of the Earth splashed off into
space. Gradually, in the ring of debris, another body congealed. Welcome to the
Moon. Without its stabilising effect on the Earth’s spin, life here would be
impossible because the climate would fluctuate wildly.
The dawn of life on Earth: Year 3 800 000 000
Surprisingly quickly, along came another turning point: the moment when
simple cells emerged from the primordial stew. Traces of descendants of these
progenitors have been found in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from Australia.
Chemical fingerprints of biological activity can be seen in even older rocks
from Greenland, dating back to 3.8 billion years ago.
Nature goes nuclear Year 2 000 000 000
The forces of nature were running a nuclear reactor on Earth long before
20th-century engineers learnt the trick. A couple of billion years ago, in a
river delta that was to become part of Gabon in West Africa, natural processes
concentrated uranium-235, creating the conditions necessary for controlled
nuclear fission. The chain reaction was kept in check by groundwater, and lasted
hundreds of thousands of years, boiling the waters of the river above. This was
the Oklo nuclear reactor, the great-great-grandaddy of Windscale, Three Mile
Island and Chernobyl.
Getting it together: Year 1 500 000 000
This was a defining moment in the evolution of the complex eukaryotic cells
that made all higher life possible. Two organisms gave up their single, carefree
lifestyles and entered into the most intimate relationship nature has seen. A
relative of the bacterium that causes typhus invaded another single-celled
creature and decided to stay there. Eventually, the bacterial invader evolved
into mitochondria, the DNA-containing structures that produce the energy on
which all our cells depend.
Boy meets girl: Year 1 000 000 000
It may not be glam but it’s true: it was probably a worm that invented sex.
Before that, all organisms reproduced asexually—effectively cloning
themselves. That was bad news if the next generation needed to be smarter or
tougher. But between half a billion and a billion years ago, invertebrates
developed sexual reproduction. Now the two proud parents could give their
offspring a mixture of their DNA—and attributes—opening up the
possibility of producing a creature more robust than themselves. Altogether, sex
gave species a lot more flexibility to respond to habitat changes.
Exit the dinosaurs: Year 66 400 000
The twilight of the Cretaceous period brought the demise of the largest
creatures that ever walked our planet—the dinosaurs. A giant fireball came
screaming out of the sky as an asteroid or comet about 15 kilometres wide hit
the Earth near Mexico. The dust thrown up by the impact darkened the sky for
months. Many plants died out, and the giant reptiles starved to death. The same
fate befell land animals weighing over 25 kilograms, along with their marine
cousins, toothed birds, ammonites and corals. Many more species were finished
off soon afterwards by intense volcanic activity, as the impact triggered lava
flows over 1 million square kilometres of the Earth’s surface. Doesn’t sound
like much to celebrate, but this moment marked the gateway to a new era: the
reign of the mammals.
Let’s talk about it: Year 2 000 000
It’s hard to imagine a time when people didn’t enjoy a chat. But the earliest
members of the genus Homo didn’t have the brains for it. Then, 2
million years ago, our ancestors’ brains nearly doubled in size—from a
measly 450 cubic centimetres to a respectable 750 cubic centimetres. Lots of
that extra volume went into bolstering the prefrontal cortex, the part of the
brain that reasons. It was at this point that hominids might have started to
communicate symbolically, using words to represent objects or ideas.
People power: Year 100 000
It was around 100 000 years ago that Homo sapiens sapiens diverged
from other hominids. The species featured an unusually large brain, vertical
forehead, pointy chin and fully erect posture and gait. At that time, a number
of human races, including Neanderthals, still walked the globe, making love and
war with each other. The first direct, albeit contentious, record of a modern
human is from 11 fossil skeletons dating back 60 000 years found in a rock
shelter south of Nazareth in Israel. The earliest recorded footprints by a
modern human were made by an eight-year-old boy walking across the Chauvet Cave
near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc in southern France 26 000 years ago.
Play it again: Year 93 000
By 100 000 years ago, our walking, talking ancestors had developed a taste
for music. The first human music was probably singing, although drumming also
has a strong claim. The earliest known instrument is a flute found in Slovenia,
which may be 93 000 years old. It probably belonged to one of our Neanderthal
cousins. Only fragments remain, but there are playable flutes, made of bone,
from Jiahu in China, that are 9000 years old. If you’d like to usher in the 94th
millennium of music with their plaintive sound, point your browser at
www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/flutes.html.
Count on it: Year 30 000
It was 30 000 years ago when an inhabitant of a cave in central Europe carved
notches on a wolf bone. Not worth getting excited about, really, except that
this particular cave dweller is the first recorded mathematician. The notches
carved in the bone were grouped in clusters of five, even though the person who
carved it couldn’t have had much of a concept of numbers. In those days, people
probably only counted “one, two” before resorting to “many”. By counting fingers
and toes, and learning how to string number words together, cultures gradually
learned about numbers as civilisations developed. What better place to start our
calendar than the dawn of counting?
A fine vintage: Year 8000
It doesn’t matter how much alcohol is sloshing around in outer space, it’s
not much good to folks back on terra firma. People have probably been drinking
alcohol since they crushed rotten grapes between their fingers. Evidence for
early alcohol is scanty, but a jug from Iran hints at wine making as far as back
as 5500 BC. The Russians claim that wine making in the Caucasus region, the
original home of the grape, dates back even further, to 6000 BC.
Counting the days: Year 6713
We like to start our calendars from a date we find particularly important:
the first Olympics, the birth of a saviour, the accession of an emperor who
feeds followers of that saviour to lions, or many other things. Even after the
calendar is finally set, it can hiccup occasionally, as most of Europe’s did in
1582 when Pope Gregory XIII made his famous adjustment to the Julian calendar to
get it back in sync with the seasons. No such problem afflicts the Julian date,
a method of keeping time introduced in 1583. For no especially good reason, this
is the number of days that have elapsed since noon, Universal Time, on 1 January
4713 BC. Party-goers hell-bent on celebrating the millennium can also celebrate
Julian date 2 451 544.5 at the midnight hour.
Family planning: Year 3550
There’s nothing new in trying to limit the size of your family. History is
littered with mentions of snakeskin condoms, pessaries of crocodile dung and
contraceptive sea sponges. The first mention of a birth control concoction that
almost certainly worked is in the Ebers papyrus, an Egyptian medical text dating
from around 1550 BC. Women were advised to soak some cotton in a paste made of
dates, honey and bark from the acacia tree, then insert it into the vagina. The
heat of the body ferments the acacia, forming lactic acid, a spermicide still in
use today.
Zero’s the hero: Year 2400
What better starting point for a calendar than the moment someone came up
with the mathematical concept of zero? Until 400 BC, mathematicians had labelled
every number with a symbol of its own. The Egyptians, for instance, used a heel
bone to represent 10 and a flower for 1000. The trouble with that way of doing
things is obvious: when you run out of symbols you run out of numbers. Then,
around the fourth century BC, the Babylonians had the bright idea that the
position of a symbol, as well as the symbol itself, can carry information. No
longer did each number need a different symbol. Today we recognise that the 2s
in 222 mean two hundreds, two tens and two ones respectively. But to preserve
position, the Babylonians needed a placeholder: zero. Now they could distinguish
between 2, 20 and 200. And when the Babylonians invented zero, they discovered
into the bargain that there are an infinite number of numbers.
Eureka moment: Year 2260
A founding scientific principle—and a popular myth—were born when
Archimedes formulated the law of buoyancy we know as Archimedes’ principle. In
260 BC, the Greek mathematician and inventor realised that anything submerged in
water is acted upon by a buoyant force equal to the weight of the water it
displaces. Archimedes may well have enjoyed the occasional bath, but there is
little evidence that he stumbled on the idea while soaking in a tub, jumped out
and ran naked through the streets shouting “Heureka!” (“I’ve found it!”). He
did, however, use the principle to determine the proportion of gold and silver
in a wreath made for King Hieron II, ruler of Syracuse.
I can see clearly now: Year 720
For everyone with less than perfect vision, let’s hear it for Alessandro di
Spina of Florence and his amico, Salvino degli Armati. Seven centuries ago, they
linked a pair of lenses with a nose-shaped bridge to create the first
spectacles.
Good thinking: Year 579
In 1421, another Florentine, architect Filippo Brunelleschi, came up with a
smart idea: he showed that using barge cranes to lift marble blocks into boats
would save workers’ time and effort. But he refused to reveal his ruse to the
Florentine government until they promised to prevent other people exploiting his
brainchild. Florence agreed—and the first patent was born, valid for three
years. Perhaps Brunelleschi would have done better to patent another idea of
his: perspective drawing. Back then, it would have been unthinkable to patent
something so abstract. But in the US, where patent rights are so important that
they are written into the constitution, enterprising souls are patenting genes
and algorithms. Think how much money Brunelleschi might have made from all those
Renaissance artists.
New worlds: Year 508
Christopher Columbus, the first European known to have to sailed the
Atlantic, established a base on Hispaniola, in what’s now Haiti, on 6 December
1492. Six years later he reached what is now Venezuela and confirmed the
presence of a new continent, describing it as “another world” and paving the way
for centuries of colonisation and exploitation. But some think Colombus was
pipped to the post—and not just by the Vikings. Following excavations near
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, archaeologist James Adovasio concluded that settlers
from Europe arrived there at least 16 000 years ago. He believes they were
technically advanced and may well have sailed straight across the Atlantic.
Dead as a…: Year 319
Not all key events are a cause for celebration, of course. We shouldn’t
forget our original environmental sin: the first well-documented case of people
exterminating another species. The dodo, a heavy, flightless bird with downy
feathers and a large, hooked beak, lived on the Indian Ocean island of
Mauritius. Following the discovery of Mauritius in the 16th century, the island
became a frequent stopover for trading ships. To hungry sailors, the slow-moving
dodo was an attractive source of meat and an easy target for anyone with a big
stick. It was also prey to the pigs, dogs and monkeys brought to the island by
Dutch settlers. The last known dodo died in 1681.
Got it licked: Year 225
People have been milking animals for thousands of years. But it has taken
most of human history to invent ice cream. Whether you lust for chocolate or
crave vanilla, credit Tortoni of Paris or Lenzi of New York, we’re barely 225
years into the gelato era.
Radio days: Year 99
Radio signals have been leaking out from the Earth into space for nearly a
century, one of the earliest being Marconi’s first transatlantic broadcast on 12
December 1901. The fact that we’ve had no extraterrestrial response to his
message—which was just three dots, the letter “S” in Morse code—nor
any alien reaction to Churchill’s speeches or the Jerry Springer Show,
suggests there are no other advanced civilisations within 50 light years. Or at
any rate, none that thinks we’re worth talking to.
Going galactic: Year 77
It’s extraordinary to think that until 1923 there was only one galaxy in the
known Universe—our own Milky Way. Astronomers hadn’t found out exactly
what the many fuzzy “nebulae” in the sky were. But in October 1923, the American
astronomer Edwin Hubble, working atop Mount Wilson in California, photographed a
star of the type known as a Cepheid variable in the Andromeda Nebula. Because
there is a fixed relationship between the intrinsic brightness of a Cepheid and
its period of variation, Hubble was able to show that this Cepheid was part of a
giant star system way beyond the Milky Way—the Andromeda Galaxy. This
confirmed what until then had been mere speculation: our Galaxy is just one of
many in a truly vast Universe.
The best thing since, er,…: Year 72
American jeweller Otto Frederick Rohwedder was driven by one great
idea—to invent a machine for slicing bread. Beginning in 1912, he used his
jeweller’s skills to match an array of rapidly moving blades with a
feather-light drive mechanism. Despite the fact that his doctor had given him
just one year to live, Rohwedder pushed on. Fire destroyed his workshop in 1917,
but still he persevered—and proved the medics wrong. By January 1928,
Rohwedder had a bread slicer in use in Battle Creek, Michigan. Rohwedder himself
never achieved celebrity status and probably never dreamt that we’d now compare
every subsequent invention to his magnificent creation.
Wonder drug: Year 72
Penicillin revolutionised the treatment of bacterial infection. The Scottish
bacteriologist Alexander Fleming noticed that the mould Pencillium
notatum, which accidentally contaminated a culture dish, killed off
bacteria growing there. A decade later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain isolated
and produced pure penicillin. This and later antibiotic wonder drugs have been a
huge hit—and that very success has been their undoing. They are now so
widely prescribed that bacteria are evolving resistance to them, and medicine is
facing a crisis. If nothing is done to check the overuse of antibiotics, they
could become redundant less than a century after their discovery.
Read all about it: Year 44
The first issue of The żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, dated 22 November 1956, told
readers why colour TV remains a far-off extravagance for most households, and
why there’s lots more work to be done if intercontinental ballistic missiles are
going to become a reality. Well you can’t win ’em all. But some problems never
seem to change. Gender-bending chemicals, a new treatment for alcoholics and
retreating glaciers were all in the news. Not a bad buy for one shilling.
Couch potato heaven: Year 44
The gizmo that has saved us hours of needless exertion was born in the same
year as this magazine. There were already crude devices attached to television
sets by wires. But when Zenith introduced its ultrasonic Space Command, our
parents were at last spared the agonising choice between having trip lines
running across the lounge and having to get up to change the channel. Since
then, infrared flashes have replaced ultrasonic chirps. If your descendants
evolve into legless blobs, blame the remote control.
The space age begins: Year 43
On 4 October 1957, the world awoke to news that the Soviet Union had lobbed a
beeping, silvery ball called Sputnik 1 into orbit around the Earth. It was
followed by more complicated satellites, some with unfortunate animals as
passengers. American generals started having nightmares about Commie missiles
pouring down from the heavens—and the East-West race to conquer space
began.
Getting connected: Year 31
In 1969, the US Department of Defense linked computers across the country in
a network that would allow military communications to carry on flowing even if a
nuclear attack wiped out a large proportion of it. The data would get through no
matter what. The Internet is the descendant of that early DoD
programme—surprising as that may seem to anyone who has lost e-mails or
watched for ages as their browser fruitlessly tries to access a Web page.
Military information on Darpanet, as it was called, was soon augmented by
e-mail, and over two decades access spread from the military to government
agencies, universities and the public. Graphical Web browsers, introduced in
1993, led to more and more users joining in as the World Wide Web exploded.
Tinkering with life: Year 27
The past year’s hubbub over genetically modified organisms makes it easy to
forget that the whole thing began nearly 30 years ago. In 1972 and 1973,
researchers in California reported that they had found a way of cutting pieces
of DNA from the genetic material of viruses and bacteria and pasting them back
in elsewhere in the genome. Now the talk is of designer genomes that could
eventually allow humans to artificially advance their own evolution. Call it
progress or Frankenscience, but genetic modification is surely here to stay.
Test-tube babes: Year 23
Before autumn 1977, a baby could grow to term only when its parents’ egg and
sperm met inside the mother’s body. In 1977, British doctors Patrick Steptoe and
Robert Edwards changed that forever. They had the idea of introducing the sperm
and egg in the lab, then implanting the resulting embryo in a woman’s uterus.
The experiment worked, and on 25 July 1978 the world’s first test-tube baby,
Louise Brown, was born. At the time, there was much public resistance to the
technique. Many people viewed it as playing God, but the doctors had no such
delusions of grandeur. “We are not creating life,” said Steptoe. “We have merely
done what many people do in all branches of medicine—try to help
˛Ô˛ąłŮłÜ°ů±đ.”
Oops!: Year 14
We’d do well to remember the world’s worst nuclear accident, caused when a
reactor operator conducting a safety test at Chernobyl made a crucial mistake. A
lousy reactor design left no margin for error, and the core disintegrated in
seconds. Eight tonnes of fuel and a section of the graphite core were ejected.
Deadly caesium and iodine vapour escaped. The legacy: 31 dead almost
immediately, 237 left with acute radiation sickness and an epidemic of childhood
thyroid cancers in Belarus and Ukraine.
Hello Dolly: Year 4
A virgin birth marks the start of our conventional calendar, so what could be
more apt for our brave new world than one that begins on 5 July 1996. That
Friday saw the birth in Scotland of the first clone of an adult mammal, a lamb
dubbed Dolly. The technology that allowed this version of fatherless
reproduction has sent shock waves throughout biology, promising advances in
agriculture, biology and medicine. Dolly was followed by a succession of clones
with cute, media-friendly names: Gene the bull, Marguerite the cow, Myra the
˛µ´Ç˛ąłŮ…
Wait for it Milestones of the past are one thing, but what’s to stop us
setting our calendar by some event in the future?
The book of life: Year –3
The human genome project’s effort to record the billions of DNA letters or
“bases” in our chromosomes is due to be completed by 2003 at the latest. The
final draft, dubbed by some the “book of life”, won’t have much of a storyline,
but generations of biologists and medical researchers will pore over its text.
Their aim: to study the tens of thousands of proteins it encodes, and understand
how they interact. There will never be a sequel.
Massive attack: Year –7
In seven years’ time, scientists should discover the elusive Higgs
particle—otherwise there’ll be red faces in the physics community. The
Higgs is named after physicist Peter Higgs, who suggested in the 1960s that by
constantly popping in and out of existence, these “virtual” particles interact
with elementary particles and give them mass. Physicists should detect the
particle at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European centre for particle
physics, when the accelerator has churned out enough results, in around 2007. If
they don’t, their theories about mass will be in trouble.
Humans create life: Year –10
In the near future, biologists should have the complete genetic sequences of
several dozen bacteria—and be ready to build one of their own, according
to Craig Venter of Celera Genomics near Washington DC. His team thinks a cell
could survive with just 300 genes. He believes that a living organism with this
stripped-down genome could be artificially created within the next decade. A
custom-built microbe could be a boon to industry and research, but Venter has
stopped the project for the moment out of concern that the cell might be
attractive to bioterrorists as a starting point for a superweapon. Some
researchers now think they can get round this problem. And curiosity being what
it is, someone will surely take up the challenge once the genetic information
needed to do it is widely available.
Number cruncher: Year –35
An array of atoms can be in billions of states all at the same time, and
physicists can exploit this quantum weirdness to do a huge number of
calculations simultaneously. Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is confident that in roughly 35 years’
time there will be a quantum computer whose capabilities will exceed the
combined processing power of all the computers that currently exist.
Watch out here we come: Year –90
After almost a century of exploration, we may have established a
self-sufficient colony on Mars. NASA has no specific plans on the drawing board,
but Robert Zubrin, a founder of the Mars Society, believes the technology exists
to allow sporadic human habitation of Mars, starting in around 2008. He reckons
that in less than a century, thousands of people could be living on the Red
Planet, producing air, water and other raw materials from the Martian soil.
Eventually, says Zubrin, the Martian colony will become “a new branch of
ł¦ľ±±ąľ±±ôľ±˛ő˛ąłŮľ±´Ç˛Ô”.
Much more than three score: Year –200
The oldest person on record was a French woman called Jeanne Calment who died
in 1997 aged 122. But a report by Eric Stallard and Kenneth Manton of Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina, predicts we can expect to do better in the
next century. From studies of mortality rates over three decades, they concluded
that somewhere on Earth there is a woman born around 1950 who will reach the age
of 136, and a man who might attain 130. Stallard says a human might reach 150 by
2200. “But when my great-grandchildren read this article, they’ll probably say I
was too conservative,” he adds.
First contact: Year –2 000 000
It’s a long shot for sure, but who knows? One of our spacecraft might make
contact with another civilisation. Pioneer 10 was first off the blocks. Launched
on 2 March 1972, it’s now around 11 billion kilometres from home. NASA estimates
that it will pass a star in the constellation Taurus in around 2 million years.
Residents—if there are any—of stellar systems in the constellation
Aquila might catch a glimpse of its sister ship, Pioneer 11, in about 4 million
years. The Pioneer craft both have a small plaque explaining where they
originated. NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 are also drifting into outer space. Both
carry gold-plated discs with recordings of sounds and images from Earth,
including greetings in 55 languages and the sound of a kiss. Any aliens who find
them can also groove to Azerbaijani bagpipes. See which other Earthly wonders
NASA chose to reveal at http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/record.html
.
The end of Earth: Year –2 500 000 000
It’s the ultimate for doomsday devotees: a calendar that counts down to the
snuffing out of all life on this planet. Barring extinction as a result of
destructive human activity or annihilation by a stray asteroid or comet, all
Earth’s denizens will die of thirst in 2.5 billion years. This ultimate drought
will be caused by the Sun, which is slowly getting hotter and brighter. Its
warming will evaporate the oceans, and the vapour will drift out into space. The
good news is that our descendants have plenty of time to found colonies in
far-off solar systems. Let’s hope they make it.