Tuesday/ looking back 13.8 billion years

There are a number of articles out this week that report that the Inflation Theory is very probably true: a postulate from the 1990s that the initial expansion of the Big Bang happened even quicker than had been thought before then.   The Big Bang is calculated to have happened 13.8 billion years ago.  So that made me run down all kinds of other milestones in the known universe and in our tiny little corner in the darkness, called Earth.  Check out my compilation below.

13.8 billion years ago .. the Big Bang happens
13.2 billion years ago .. the Milky Way galaxy is formed
4.54 billion years ago.. our planet Earth forms
3.6 billion years ago .. the first simple cells (prokaryotes) are formed
231.4 million years ago .. radiometric dating of the rock formation that contained fossils from the early dinosaur genus Eoraptor establishes its presence in the fossil record at this time
65 million years ago .. dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period
20 million years ago .. great apes from the family Hominidae appear
2.5 million years ago .. the genus Homo (human predecessors) appear
1 million years ago .. evidence from the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa point to the use of fire by early humans
200,000 years ago .. anatomically modern humans appear
110,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago .. the most recent Ice Age; a small number of humans survive, one such community on the southern coast of Africa
10,000 years ago .. the last mainland species of woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) die out, as does the last Smilodon species
5,000 years ago .. the earliest known iron artifacts are nine small beads, dated to 3200 BC, from burials in Gerzeh, northern Egypt, that were made from meteoritic iron, and shaped by careful hammering
2,600 years ago .. the ancient Greeks discovered that rubbing fur on amber (fossilized tree resin) caused an attraction between the two : static electricity
900 years ago .. the invention of gunpowder was made perhaps as early as during the Tang Dynasty (9th century), but certainly by the Song Dynasty (11th century).
578 years ago .. the printing press is invented, in 1436
326 years ago .. in 1688 the dodo goes extinct
131 years ago ..in 1883, the quagga, a subspecies of zebra, goes extinct
129 years ago .. Benz invents the first gasoline automobile, in 1886
111 years ago .. the Wright brothers invent the first airplane, in 1903
100 years ago .. in 1914, Martha, last known passenger pigeon, dies
69 years ago .. the Manhattan Project culminates in the test explosion of a nuclear device at what is now called the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen a few weeks later.
45 years ago .. man lands on Earth’s moon in 1969
21 years ago .. the World Wide Web is created, in 1993
17 years ago .. the Prius first went on sale in Japan in 1997, and was available at all four Toyota Japan dealerships, making it the first mass-produced hybrid vehicle
6 years ago .. in 2008, the Baiji, the Yangtze river dolphin, becomes functionally extinct
Just a few seconds ago .. this entry is posted on the Willem’s Planet blog

HistoryOfUniverse-BICEP2-20140317
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Planet Earth is ever so much younger. And all of us? We appeared on its face a mere cosmic instant ago.

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