ABSTRACT
The great astrophysicist Carl Sagan once wrote, “The world is very old and human beings are very young.”2 In a passage from The Dragons of Eden entitled “The Cosmic Calendar” Sagan made the complex comprehensible by taking all of history and compressing it into a single year. He placed the 15 billionyear history of the universe in context placing the origin of the universe on January 1, the formation of Earth on September 14, the origin of microbes on October 9, the appearance of dinosaurs on December 24, and the appearance of humans at 10:30 p.m. on December 31. So according to this cosmic calendar, each of us has an astounding 0.16 seconds of life on this planet!
