JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God?

EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet -- [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me.

JG: Funny ha-ha or funny strange?

EV: Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time. And now, this is my real concern, and it doesn't have that much to do with God, but what we've done in the last 50 years, which is like my fingernail, and how fast things are moving, and what's going to happen in the next bit. I mean, we're really fucking things up. And now I'm the young guy bitching but I think there is an answer and I hope people educate themselves about technology and what's happening. I think you should educate yourself about...

Compress the 13 billion year history of the universe into a single year, starting with the Big Bang on January 1 at midnight and ending in the current moment, midnight on New Year’s Day the next year. When did humans appear in the past year? Sometime in the summer, maybe? Fourth of July weekend good for you? That seemed about right to me at age ten.

Even that was progress compared to the biblical version, of course, which at this scale pops humans into the mix ninety seconds after midnight on New Year’s Day, before the last of the noisemakers has even stopped bleating. But even at July 4th, I was still a full paradigm shift away from getting it.

Sagan took care of that in three pages of The Dragons of Eden, and in the process blew my hair back in a way that I wouldn’t even want to recomb.

When you boil 13 billion years down to one, each day is thirty-five million years long. We all have days like that. The Milky Way galaxy forms around May 1st. The Earth is born on September 14th. So for the first two-thirds of the history of the universe, our planet didn’t even exist.

Humans can be safely considered unimportant during this eight-billion-year period.

Life on Earth appears just half a billion years after the planet itself, on September 25th. No, not dinosaurs. Microscopic, single-celled life. They rule the Earth with a tiny iron flagellum until November 12th, when minuscule undersea plants appear. By December 1st, these plants have created an oxygen atmosphere.

For us, you’re thinking, deep inside. They’re getting the world ready…for us. You’re funny. Stop it.

Ready for dinosaurs now? Keep waiting. Thirty-ton lizards do not spring into being from microorganisms. There’s work to be done, and this kind of work takes time. By December 16th – just eight shopping days until Christmas – we’ve reached a critical step on the road to Us.

Worms.

By December 19th we’ve got fish. Not yet grillable, but stay tuned. Land plants thirty million years later on the 20th, insects on the 21st, amphibians on the 22nd…

Wait a minute. Surely I’ve made a mistake. Only nine days left in the year, and still no Lords of the Universe?

On the 23rd, the first trees come to pass. And at last, on Christmas Eve, the dinosaurs begin their 180 million year reign. Christmas Eve. December 28th, wham, an enormous asteroid slams into the Yucatán. Also flowers are invented.

Oh, and humans? Lemme check.

Okay…here it is. On the scale of a single cosmic year, your species – Homo sapiens, was it? – okay, Homo sapiens enters at 10:30 pm on December 31st. That’s ninety minutes ago. Ninety minutes out of a year.

That’s Finding Nemo with one potty break.

The Pyramids were built ten seconds ago. The birth of Christ was four seconds ago. Copernicus, one second ago. So much for the grand human pageant marching across the span of all time.

Or another analogy taken from Carl Sagan's Cosmic calendar:

Fuckbrains

The earth is only like 6000 years old, I thought everybody knew that at this point.

So actually, corduroy_bimbo, you've been alive for almost .5% of the earth's total existence.

You're getting to be kind of a one-note poster.

corduroy_bimbo

this is your best post.

Time doesn't actually exist,

time is a place