If we talk about popularizers of science, it resonates high Carl Sagan who like no other managed to cross the barrier of scientific complexity to transmit his fascination for the cosmos. Through stories and simple explanations, he transmitted his knowledge to inspire more than one around the world.
And it is that the ability to transform a highly abstract and complex world, to more digestible forms of understanding, is a gift that very few possess. He took it upon himself to put that vastness of intricate knowledge into simple terms. Even, Carl Sagan was able to translate cosmological history into a simple cosmic calendar similar to the one we use today. So that millions could assimilate the immensity of the time that the Universe has elapsed until today.
The history of the Universe escapes our understanding, because the magnitude of the event does not fit into our mental structure. We need to rethink ourselves in abstract terms, to add a new expanded understanding of reality. Precisely, Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar allows us to compress the 13,800 million years, to the duration of a calendar equivalent to one year and thus to understand the magnitude of the story.
What is Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar?
This is a simple way to visually observe the time span that our Universe has elapsed since the Big Bang. The distribution of 15,000 million years* has been adjusted to the calendar that we use to measure the 12 months of the year. In other words, Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar is the history of the Universe summarized in one year.
In this distribution, each month would represent 1250 million years. Each day equals 40 million years and every secondsome 500 years of our history. Hardly a blink in the work of cosmic time.
*At the time of Carl Sagan, the calculations indicated that the age of the Universe was 15,000 million years. We now know that the cosmic age is 13.8 billion years.
Chronology of the Universe according to Carl Sagan
In terms of the cosmic calendar, the big Bang It happened in the first second of January 1. According to the summarized time distribution, The Milky Way it would have been born in May and other systems would have appeared in June, July and August.
The sun and earth they appeared seven months after the Big Bang explosion, in the month of September and life arose shortly after this. According to Sagan himself, humans have emerged so recently that the events in our history occupy only seconds of the last minute of December 31.
The humans appear on the calendar, only until 22:30 on December 31. At 11:46 p.m. that same day, the men learned to master the fire. Just one minute before the end of the day, at 11:59 p.m., the rock art in the caves of Europe and at 23:59:20 the human learns the farming. And it is not until 23:59:59, that the historical period known as the Renaissance.
Finally, the year ends, we find ourselves in the present time; the first second of the New Year. Where the expansion of science and technology in search of intelligent life in extraterrestrial space arises.
hubble telescope
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