Seed Magazine has a great feature it describes as "an experiment in scale" which condenses "4.6 billion years of history into a minute."  Though they call it the evolution of life - there is no life for a significant portion of the video - so I'm calling it the history of the earth.

A video from s3.amazonaws.com was embedded here; it is no longer available.

It reminds me of the opening of The Story of Mankind, the first book to win the Newbery Award in 1922, describing "a single day of eternity":

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak.

When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

Of course, the concept of a measure of eternity is meaningless - but by attempting to measure it in such a way, we realize to some degree what the concept is. 

Seed takes the opposite approach by condensing billions of years of history into 60 seconds.

Comments

Lashay · 2014-12-22

I know this web page gives quality depending articles or reviews and extra stuff, is there any other site which provides these data in quality?

Major · 2014-12-25

Everything is very open with a precise explanation of the issues. It was definitely informative. Your site is useful. Many thanks for sharing!

obat tradisional · 2014-12-27

Excellent site you've got here.. It's hard to find high quality writing like yours these days. I really appreciate individuals like you! Take care!!

Tags: Evolution, Seed Magazine

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 and is filed under Videos. Comments are closed; the conversation is kept as it was.