Cleopatra Is Closer

You might already know that Cleopatra is actually closer in time to the release of the iPhone than to the building of the Great Pyramid in Egypt. This is an example I hear all the time, designed to show you that your perception of time is completely wack.

We tend to think about ancient Egypt as being…. well, ancient. It was a long time ago, so Cleopatra and the pyramids are kind of compartmentalized into the same category, but when we consider that more time passed between the pyramids and Cleopatra than between Cleopatra and today, we might be a little surprised.

Göbekli Tepe is another great example I hear a lot. Something like 5000 years ago, we humans figured out how to write things down so we could remember them later in some detail. Göbekli Tepe came to be almost 7000 years before writing.

How useful are these sorts of observations? I happen to think they’re very useful if you want to get a real picture of how events have unfolded, but to be honest with you, I just think these are really fun to think about.

Stepping away from history, the dinosaurs provide another nonintuitive example of what I’m talking about. See this sweet image of a Stegosaurus and a T-rex?

This looks really cool to the little kid inside of you who loves dinosaurs! Unfortunately, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex lived further apart in time than T-Rex and humans. This is a lot like the concept of ancient Egypt we hold in our minds: we tend to think all dinosaurs lived around the same time.

You can go even further back than the Dinosaurs to see this sort of comparison—all the way to the formation of the Earth itself. A little over four and a half billion years ago, a swirling proto-Earth began to form. Just about a billion or so years later, life was already here.

In other words, our planet went from dust to life in just a billion years or so, and then life cooked on the planet for another 3.5 billion years before we humans arrived on the scene. Life has been around for a long, long time, and it is a huge part of what makes our planet the way it is.

The cosmic calendar makes us feel tiny and insignificant, but we’ve made our mark on the planet in our time, with some geologists arguing that we’ve entered a new geological era they propose to call the antropocene.

This era isn’t all about our effect on the Earth, though: it’s about us. Nothing fascinates us humans more than other humans, and so it is in the realm of human experience that I’ll share my last comparisons for the day.

Nintendo has been around longer than the Eiffel Tower.

That’s right! The iconic 8-bit system that fueled so many of my middle and high school afternoons was produced by a company that was already nearly a hundred years old.

There’s one person who lived before the Eiffel Tower went up, and after Super Mario Brothers rocked my tween world. Jeanne Calment met Vincent Van Gogh, too, and even lived to see the Dot Com bubble start to form.

Calment at age twenty

Another really good one: it took us 58 years from the moment the Wright Brothers first flew, up until the first human beings were sent to space. Think of all the insane innovation that went from a propeller-driven kludge made from bicycle parts, to a rocket that could propel a human being into space and then bring them safely back to Earth.

That first human (Yuri Gagarin) went up into space in 1961. Here we are, 63 years later.

Does it seem right that more time passed between the first human in space and today, than between the first airplane flight and the first human in space? This one’s particularly tough for me to grasp because I was born well after human space flight became almost routine, or at least that’s how it seemed to us kids at home.

All of these examples represent an attempt to measure time that goes beyond the typical human intuition. We’re not wired to see much beyond our current space and time, so we have to stretch our minds a bit in order to see time as it truly is at a larger scale.

I’ve tried to do just that with a couple of other approaches you might enjoy reading next, if you have a little extra time and curiosity today. And, as usual, I want to hear what you think: have you noticed any wild differences in time like those we’ve discussed today? What are the least intuitive spaces between events you know of?