One often hears people saying things like 'once in a lifetime event' or 'it will last a lifetime' or 'not in living memory'. This got me thinking that a lifetime is very insignificant time when you compare it against the life of a tree, the life of a planet and so on.

Scientists are spending billions of dollars of taxpayers money attempting to find out exactly how old the universe is. At the moment the known universe is arguably about fifteen billion years old, that is 15,000,000,000 years old. If you are not a merchant banker or a politician this number is extremely difficult to get ones head around and I thought up this method to make it easier to visualise.

Imagine the life of the universe to be represented as a book of fifteen volumes, one volume for each billion years, and each volume has one thousand pages, representing the millions of years for each billion, and each page has one thousand words, each word represents one thousand years. If each word has an average of five characters, then each character is worth two hundred years. This would mean that any persons lifetime would be represented by half an exclamation mark!

Looking at a time-line as places in the 15 volumes of the book:

Creation of the universe, the big bang, volume 1 page 1.
The formation of earth, volume 10 at about page 450.
First life and start of photosynthesis in volumes 11 and 12.
Multicellular life forms, volume 13 page 500.
First animals, volume 15 page 250.
Volume 15 sees the start of most land plants and animals.
Hominins start on vol 15 page 999.

The last page of volume 15 is perhaps the time we are most familiar with, in that time there were ten ice ages with modern man appearing during ice age 8, thats page 1000 line 80, and continuing until today. Thus in fifteen volumes man appears on the last page of the last volume near the bottom of the page.

Note: many sources give the life of the universe as 13.5 billion years but as discoveries are made it is pushing the age towards 15 billion. As the age is determined by red shift other ways of measurement need to be created.

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