How old is the universe? Can we imagine it?
- let's explore together...
1, At the beginning, we were watching the first episode of the series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and learnt about the project called "The cosmic calendar"
Our students summarised the basic ideas for all of us:
A cosmic calendar is a method how to visualize the chronology of our universe. 13.8 thousand million years are compressed into one calendar year. Every day in it represents 40 million years in the history of our universe.
Everything started on the 1st of January with the Big Bang. At first it was followed by 200 million years of darkness meanwhile the gravity was pulling together dumps of gas. During January first stars and first small galaxies were created.
All was cooked in the hearts of stars. The nuclei of hydrogen atoms fused to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. This star stuff is recycled and enriched over and over again.
Our galaxy was formed on March the 15th. But only on September 1st our Sun was born 4.5 billion years ago. Our Earth and other planets were made from gas and dust orbiting the new-born Sun.
First life forms appeared on September the 21st but multicellular life appears only in December. Dinosaurs, birds and insects evolved during the last week and humans evolved only within the last hour of the last day of the cosmic calendar.
On the 31st of December at 23:59:46, 14 s before midnight, about 6,000 years ago, we invented writing – it means we could save our thoughts and send them to future people. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammed were born in last seconds. Only at 23:59:59, in the last second, we began to use science.
If we think in this perspective, we can realise how small we (human beings) are and how short the history of our civilisation is.
Our students prepared several posters to advertise these ideas:
A cosmic calendar by A..pdf
A cosmic calendar by M..pdf
Cosmic Calendar Mi..docx