interesting perspective on history

[clutchdust]

i was thinking about this a couple weeks ago and kind of playing with the idea so tell me what you think.
if you were to count historical events in the perspective of a human life it puts a different spin on how long ago events happened and how far we've come in such a relatively short time. imagine if you were to count a lifetime as a 50 year span. so in this example a human was born, lives 50 years and dies. at the time of that person's death another human is born, lives the 50 years, dies and so on. now this is just an aggregate of time for the purpose of my little exercise. so with that in mind check this out.
one lifetime ago humans first left the bonds of gravity to explore space.
just about two lifetimes ago humans first experienced heavier than air flight.
only three lifetimes ago America was torn in the war of reunification ("civil war").
not even five lifetimes ago General George Washington led a rag-tag army against the greatest military power of the time.
now here's where things start to get interesting...
10 lifetimes ago columbus "discovered" the new world
30 lifetimes ago the (western) roman empire fell
40 lifetimes ago a man named jesus was born
~54 lifetimes ago (depending on your historical source) was the battle and fall of the great city of troy.
only about 80 lifetimes ago the egyptians built the great pyramids.
around 100 lifetimes ago was essentially the beginning of human civilization.
i don't know about all of you but when i put historical events into that model, they seem much more close and personal. the more recent the event, the less it differs but when you get into the double digits, time just doesn't seem that long.

 

[mrvette]

Good thoughts, but you gotta consider, overlapping lifetimes, and average age at death back 'when' was about age 35 at 1910 or so it was ~45....

so what we consider kids today, were expected to have babies of their own by age 20 at latest, ....by teen age years the folks were statistically dead.....Grandparents were rare.....

On a visit to Williamsburg Va. that restored colonial town...there is a graveyard beside the traditional church....in there is a marker of a woman and child who died during childbirth woman age like 18 or so.....tough life back then.....

so to almost 1/2 your 50 years there, making the rest of the figgers almost double ........

Then the fact that the village my grandparents came from... on very old maps of E. Europe does not show as existing at all on modern maps....makes me wonder is anyone left behind/descendants survived to see today....

wonder what a good through search could find for olde tyme foundations?? had to have been SOME sort of housing in a village....suspect hitler, stalin, lenin, took care of it....

 

[SmokinBBC]

Put that way...history doesn't appear to be that far in the past.......

 

[mrvette]

Put that way...history doesn't appear to be that far in the past.......

Too boot the only people I know of that can trace their family back very far are the English Kings/royalty....

and that's mainly because it's a island....the rest is a crapshoot depending on which army march where.....:clobbered::harhar:

 

[clutchdust]

GENE, that's why i specifically used "lifetimes" rather than "generations". if you were to use generations, you would have to take my numbers and multiply by about 2.5. if you did, it's still a remarkably small amount of time in the scheme of things. when you think, well at least when i think back to the "ancient romans" 1500 years ago seems like such an incredible length of time, but when you put it in the perspective of 30 lifetimes, it throws that perspective out of whack.
like i said, 50 years was just an aggregate. for much of human history, the average life expectancy was only 45-50 years.

 

[mrvette]

Very old thought with me is about all those constant wars, it's all about the egos of the der leaders, or in this case some mullah who thinks he going to be immortalized.....

what was that poet?? the guy about looking on works and despair ....someting about Ozzy Man Diaz.....

:flash:

 

[greg75vette]

I like this a lot. All of human history tends to be small in the presence of everything else. To this planet, we are the new kids on the block. Is it 5 billion years the planet has been around? Human existence started about 10,000 years ago so tha means the planet has been around 500,000 TIMES longer and we have only existed 0.000002% of the planet's current history.

I feel small now

 

[mrvette]

I like this a lot. All of human history tends to be small in the presence of everything else. To this planet, we are the new kids on the block. Is it 5 billion years the planet has been around? Human existence started about 10,000 years ago so tha means the planet has been around 500,000 TIMES longer and we have only existed 0.000002% of the planet's current history.

I feel small now

Me 2, thing that is mighty curious is that the universe we look at is somehow a replica of the atoms/electrons/protons/newtrons/and maybetrons we think exist in physics.....especially new clear physics......

that last mis enunciation is courtesty of Walk Kelly's...Pogo, a olde tyme cartoon strip....

so we go from the very very small the the maxi macro....weird, eh???

:amazed:

 

[BRUTAL64]

I like this a lot. All of human history tends to be small in the presence of everything else. To this planet, we are the new kids on the block. Is it 5 billion years the planet has been around? Human existence started about 10,000 years ago so tha means the planet has been around 500,000 TIMES longer and we have only existed 0.000002% of the planet's current history.

I feel small now

4 billion years for earth and "humans" starting showing up 250,000 years ago.

 

[greg75vette]

Well I was way off huh :suicide: Now that I think of it, 10,000 years ago we began to form society. Although I did think it was more like 100,000 year ago humans began to walk the Earth, but We'll go with your number since my track record is slightly 'off' in this topic, haha.