The Immensity of Earth time

This segment deals with the vast expanse of time since the formation of the Earth 4,600 million years ago, and the difficulty in relating such a time scale to the one we are familiar with, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years.

Time is an abstract concept with no actual physical manifestation. Time is usually comprehended in relation to personal experience-extrapolating the experience of seven or seventy years to the thousands of millions of years of Earth's history is a complex and difficult task. Yet understanding the immensity of geological time is central to understanding factors which affect our everyday lives and perceptions of ourselves. Climate change, extinction, environmental degradation, and the origin and future of the human species are all subjects of debate and interest in the public arena which require an understanding of geological time.

The primary difficulty in portraying a scale representation of the history of the Earth is that there is no record of life for the first 24% of geological time, and the fossil record for the next 64% of time is very poor. The development of the great diversity of organisms inhabiting the Earth occurred in the remaining 12% of time, and it is only in the last 5% of time that groups capturing the public imagination, such as dinosaurs and mammals, appeared. Humans have existed for only 0.1% of the Earth's history. Most exhibitions of past life disproportionately concentrate on the last 12% of time, thus failing to provide an understanding of the immensity of Earth's history and leaving the visitor with a distorted view of time.

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