Deep Timeline – a log-scaled timeline of the universe

Deep Timeline: a log-scaled timeline of the universe

In junior high school in Syracuse, New York, we did an earth science project to create a paleontology timeline. Dinosaurs, mammals, geological epochs and eras, extinctions.

My friend and I got an adding-machine tape, and being the nerds we were, we decided to do it on a log scale, so the Big Bang could be at one end and what we had for lunch the day before could be at the other. Each segment ten times as long as the same length to the right. We got our calculators and started taking logarithms of the dates of all kinds of paleological events. We plotted them on the 40’ long tape, and hung it up in the classroom. I still have that tape somewhere, and I’ve been wanting to create an interactive version for many many years.

In the past few years I’ve been working with Long Now Boston, so I’ve been thinking a lot about Deep Time and our connection to the past, as well as our responsibility to possible futures and our descendants. I had some free time, and this idea somehow suddenly bubbled up from somewhere deep. I thought “why not?” and since I’d been using AI do do some coding assistant work, I thought it could scaffold the thing pretty quickly.

Before long, I had it working, and then I couldn’t stop until I got it fluidly responsive and nice looking – and then I started adding more world events: arts and culture, natural history, women, inventions, philosophy, and so on.

And here it is! Deep Timeline Navigator. I hope you enjoy it! It’s all free and open source; the code is on github.