Speck: 13.8 billion years. Starting with you.

An experiment by Mayur Chaudhary.

This second

Right now. Your heart just beat. Four babies just took their first breath. Somewhere in the universe, a star just exploded. Hold on to this second. It’s about to become very, very small.

Your lifetime

About 30,000 days. Every birthday, every heartbreak, every 3 a.m. thought, every person you’ve loved. It feels like everything. Watch what happens to it.

Recorded history

Along the way: the wheel, writing on clay, the Great Pyramid, an Indus Valley seal, the Vedas, the Parthenon, Ashoka’s wheel of law, the Colosseum, Brahmagupta’s rules of zero, the sun wheel of Konark, the printing press, the telescope, the Taj Mahal, the steam locomotive, the light bulb, first powered flight, Gandhi’s charkha, and a footprint on the Moon.

Five thousand years ago, someone in Mesopotamia pressed a reed into wet clay, and history began. The pyramids, the Vedas, every empire and every song you know. And your whole life? That thin amber line.

Homo sapiens

For almost 300,000 years we told stories around fires and wrote none of them down. Their names are gone. Their faces live on in yours.

Dinosaurs

For 165 million years, this planet belonged to them. Then, in a single day, a rock ten kilometres wide fell out of the sky. At this scale, humans don’t even reach one pixel.

Life on Earth

For three billion years, life was invisible. Single cells, patient as stone. Then some of them learned to eat sunlight and filled the air with oxygen. Every breath you take, you owe to them.

The universe

13.8 billion years ago, everything was a single point. The iron in your blood was forged later, inside a dying star. You are, quite literally, made of old starlight.

Back to now

If the universe’s story were one year long, all of recorded history would fit in the last 11 seconds of December 31st. Your whole life would last less than a fifth of a second. And yet, out of all that time, the universe made you. The one part of it that can look back and wonder.

Ancient Indian thought measured time in kalpas, each 4.32 billion years long. The universe is about three of them old.