DINOSAURS, Life On Earth, And Relativity.

This is a bit out there, but hey what the fuck can you do. I was bombing through Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary last night when there was a segment about the explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. As I am wont to be, I got a bit curious and began wondering: just how long enough was this shit?, what were we up to?, and perhaps more vacuously: could people have come to Earth (people being a rather homosapien-heavy filtering of the notion of intelligent life, a concept perhaps even beyond our simian brains to comprehend outside of limited parameters) and I came across a pretty awesome way of looking at Dinosaurs, Us, and How Long We’ve Been Here.

USGS:

Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. If all of Earth time from the very beginning of the dinosaurs to today were compressed into 365 days (1 calendar year), the dinosaurs appeared January 1 and became extinct the third week of September. (Using this same time scale, the Earth would have formed approximately 18.5 years earlier.) By comparison, people (Homo sapiens) have been on earth only since December 31 (New Year’s eve). The dinosaurs’ long period of dominance certainly makes them unqualified successes in the history of life on Earth

Fucking awesome, people. That sort of scale is nauseatingly fantastic.