Cosmological time scale 2 | Scale of the universe | Cosmology & Astronomy | Khan Academy

TL;DR

The video demonstrates the vastness of time by compressing 13.7 billion years into pixels, showing that the entire existence of humanity is just a fraction of a pixel.

Transcript

In the last video, we tried to relate what 13.7 billion years really means by compressing it to 10 years, which is still a pretty long time, at least from our perspective. And we saw that these huge periods of time, everything that's happened since the United States Declaration of Independence, all gets compressed into just five seconds. And that's... Read More

Key Insights

• 🛀 The video shows how compressing 13.7 billion years into pixels helps comprehend the vastness of time.
• ⚖️ Human existence is minuscule in the grand scale of the universe, represented by a fraction of a pixel.
• 🦕 The timeline emphasizes the relative duration of the dinosaurs' presence on Earth compared to modern humans.

Questions & Answers

Q: How does the timeline demonstrating the scale of time work?

The video uses the width of a screen as a representation of the 13.7 billion years timeline, with each pixel indicating a significant span of time. This helps visualize the scale of different historical events.

Q: How big is the representation of modern humans in the timeline?

Modern humans, in comparison to the entire timeline, are so insignificant that their existence would not even register as a pixel. It would be a tiny fraction of a pixel.

Q: What can be inferred about the dinosaurs' presence on the timeline?

The dinosaurs' extinction would have occurred approximately six pixels from the end of the timeline. This implies that their existence was relatively long compared to the entire span of time.

Q: How does the timeline compare to significant historical events?

The timeline demonstrates that even the most significant historical events, like the birth of Jesus or the American Declaration of Independence, would only occupy a fraction of a pixel on the screen.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The timeline of the universe, spanning 13.7 billion years, is compressed into the width of a screen, with each pixel representing millions or thousands of years.

• Modern humans have been on the planet for only a fraction of a pixel, while the dinosaurs would have been extinct six pixels from the end.

• Even when the last pixel is expanded to the length of the screen, it still only represents 8,000 years, highlighting the smallness of human existence.