Time - Put into a Historical Perspective

Another facet of life that’s fascinating........ the historical timeline perspective.  I realized through a recent conversation with a friend that we’re pretty blissfully ignorant here; and true enough, it's also one of those facets where not knowing makes zero relevance to life. Much like astronomy I guess.

Strange huh, that space and time are pretty much irrelevant pieces of information to most…….. guess we all love living in our cocoons :)

Lets do a time journey this time, but we don’t want to get overwhelmed by huge numbers, so let’s just do it with what we know. Here’s, in a nutshell, a journey back through landmark events from memory, text book memory of course, and from an Indian vantage point:

Independence: 60 years, World Wars: 100 years, Industrial Revolution: 200 to 300 years (that to some extent overlaps with the British rule in India), Later Indian Dynastic rule (read Vijayanagar empire, Maratha empire, Suri dynasty) which ran kind of parallel to the Mughal empire: 800 years, Advaita ( Adi Shankara): around 1200 years, Early Indian Dynasties (Kakatiya, Hoysala, Chalukya, Satavahana, Chola and the Mauryan empire: almost 2000 years (remember Ashoka the great?). We’ve just about moved into the BC bit of our calendar, so going beyond 2000 years.

Buddha was 400 years before 0 year on the calendar as we know it, yeah, 400 BC, The Vedic period was over 1000 years into BC, Indus valley civilization ( remember Mohenjedaro and Harappa from school) was 1700 to 2500 years BC and that’s when the Aryans entered India. From before that there’s no recorded history. Stone age paintings are dated about 9000 years and the rest of what we know is from fossils and archaeology, which dates mans (homo sapien) existence to around 1,00,000 to 2,00,000 years.

So humans as we know, have been around 0.2 million years

Yep, shifting gear into the millions :), and just throwing some facts in here. It’s jaw dropping perspective, when you consider how little time you’ve been around and how much has been accomplished in these last 2000 odd years.

Dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago and they lived for a period stretching over 250 million years; of which , thanks to Steven Spielberg, we know something about one phase, The Jurassic Period.

The spectacular rock formations around Hyderabad are dated at 2500 million years old, amongst the oldest and hardest rock formations in the world. In fact even the mighty Himalayas are way younger, they are around 40 - 60 million years old. So, when in Hyderabad, do feel the awe for those majestic and beautiful formations. 

On the way from Hitech station to Hitech city 

(courtesy: Pranav Yaddanapudi )

(courtesy: Society to save rocks)

And the earth itself is said to have been in existence for 4600 million years

An earth clock of History of Life on Earth

Hard to fit it into one frame, right? What's interesting here is not as much the timespan of man relative to the earth, but man in the blue line, of Life on Earth, that little red gash. It kind of puts a timeline perspective on evolution and just how new an entrant we are. 

Any reason why we need to know all this? No. But IMHO, if it can evoke the feeling of wonder....... even for a while, it’s worth it :)