Bad Math

I ran across a blog about evolution and was pretty impressed. However, in a section where an attempt was being made to put the time frame for human evolution into perspective it was stated that if the earth had existed for an hour animals would not have developed until after the first 50 minutes and humans had only been around for a hundredth of a second, which sounded way off. I actually do have a good perspective on time and it is an important and difficult thing to grasp. My point is it seemed wrong to me, so I did a little calculating.

With a bit of Googling I get early sponges as the fist animals around 700 million years ago (MYA), which is the last 9.25 minuets in the one hour scenario (so far so good). However, the way I see it, the hundredth of a second for human existence is off by an order of magnitude. That figure comes out to between 10 and 20 thousand years ago. Here is a breakdown so you can see if you agree.

Given:

Earth formed ca. 4,540 MYA

Homo sapiens evolved ca. 0.35 MYA

3,600 sec./hr.

.35/4540*3600=0.2775

Therefore:

If the time the earth has existed is compressed to an hour, humans have only been around for the last .28 seconds.

FWIW:
Primates @ ca. 60 MYA - 48 sec.
Hominids @ ca. 5 MYA - 4 sec.
Homo sp. @ ca. 2.5 MYA - 2 sec.

Having a perspective on time is not an unsubstantial aspect of understanding evolution. I thought it was worth pointing out the error as it is an impressive enough idea at about a quarter of a second that it needn't be exaggerated. Even if the time frame is expanded to all of existence (the universe is estimated to have formed ca. 13,700 MYA) it still only comes out to 0.092 sec. That is, if time immemorial was only an hour long, humans would have been around for just under a tenth of a second, which is actually the number I thought I remembered and made me look at the math.

With all these crazy numbers that are so hard to conceptualize on a human scale, how is it that federal budgets run into the trillions of dollars (that's millions of millions!) and nobody seems to bat an eye? Sorry, that was just a little stream of consciousness random thought I threw in for no particular reason.

Anyway, I had fun looking up the numbers and seeing if I knew as much as I thought I might and thought I would share. Who says MySpace is a complete waste of time.