Time Scale Quotes

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

I believe in science and evolution. I've been to the Grand Canyon.

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.

The scale of time for a politician runs between one primary and the next, and in Israel, this means two to three years because elections almost never take place once every four years as stipulated by law. The timetable for a system of research is completely different.

It's hard being a rock; they have such a strange sense of time - and priorities.

My week beats your year.

When you say ‘old friend,’ are we talking, like...since the Ice Age?” “No. Of course not.” “Oh.” “It’s only been about four hundred years.” “Ah. Yes. Only four hundred.” A wry expression spread over his face. “Being with you is a continual experiment in perspective. Among other things.

A split second is nothing compared to twenty-four hours. On God's clock you're in the middle of your millisecond. Compared to eternity, what is seventy, eighty, ninety years?

Geological time is not money.

Dinosaurs are the best way to teach kids, and adults, the immensity of geologic time.

I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?

When the first man created Himself, He was the light of the circle. Then He willed the sun into being It was 6 trillion years between the making of the sun and the creation of man.

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet.

I remind myself that the universe is 15 billion years old, and I'm only 46 years old, so my perspective is sort of limited and fear-based and skewed.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

Our individual life is brief, and perhaps the whole life of mankind will be brief if measured in astronomical scale

Grant knew that people could not imagine geological time. Human life was lived on another scale of time entirely. An apple turned brown in a few minutes. Silverware turned black in a few days. A compost heap decayed in a season. A child grew up in a decade. None of these everyday human experiences prepared people to be able to imagine the meaning of eighty million years - the length of time that had passed since this little animal had died.

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

The days of the Mosaic creation are not to be strictly construed as implying the same length of time which is at present occupied by a single revolution of our globe, but PERIODS of a much longer extent.

Thinking about the new epoch - often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity - challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years.

We've more important studies than your fantasies and fears You know that rock's been perched up there for a hundred thousand years.