The Universe in a year!

The American astronomer Carl Sagan (1932-96) first suggested a "cosmic calendar" as a way of helping people understand the history of the Universe. He put everything into the scale of a calendar year: the galaxies are formed over nine months and the Earth appears in September. All human history is crowded into the last five minutes of the last day of the year. Recent time has to be divided into seconds and fractions of a second. So everything that happened over the last 475 years takes place in less than the last second of the last minute of the year.

DATE / TIME and EVENT
1 Jan (midnight) : Big Bang - Universe forms

15 Mar : First stars and galaxies form
1 May : Milky Way galaxy forms
8 Sep : Sun forms
9 Sep : Solar system forms
12 Sep : Earth forms
13 Sep : Moon forms
20 Sep : Earth's atmosphere forms
1 Oct : Earliest known life on Earth
7 Oct : Earliest known fossils
18 Dec : First many-celled life forms
19 Dec : First fish
21 Dec : First land plants; first insects
23 Dec : First reptiles
24 Dec : First dinosaurs
26 Dec : First mammals
27 Dec : First birds
28 Dec : First flowering plants
28 Dec : Dinosaurs extinct
31 Dec (11:55 pm) : Homo sapiens (modern human) appears

HOUR:MINUTE:SECOND / Fractions of second

11:59.50.487 pm -- Great Pyramid is built (2520 BC)

11:59.55.333 pm -- Great Wall of China is built (215 BC)

11:59.56.785 pm -- Roman Empire falls (AD 476)
11:59.58.026 pm -- Battle of Hastings ( 1066)
11:59.58.921 pm -- Columbus lands in America (1492)
11:59.59.128 pm -- Shakespearewrites his first plays (1588-90)
11:59.59.874 pm -- World War II ends (1945)
11:59.59.891 pm -- Mount Everest is climbed (1953)
11:59.59.924 pm -- Man lands on the Moon (1969)
Midnight -- Today

THE WORLD IN A SINGLE DAY
In one day (24 hours or 3,600 minutes or 216,ooo seconds) the world turns once on its axis. During that time, on average :

• 358,522 people are born
• 155,012 people die
• 203,510 are added to the world's population

Taken from : Whitaker's World of Facts page 12