Universe timeline
NASA: Timeline of the Universe. http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/library/poster/poster.html
From the Big Bang to the End of the Universe--The Mysteries of Deep Space Timeline
http://www.pbs.org/deepspace/timeline/index.html
Alexander Kozik, Universe Timeline. http://www.atgc.org/TimeLine/
History of the Universe: Timeline. http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/tl1.html
Graphical timeline of our universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_of_our_universe
Timeline of the universe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/apr/26/universe.physics
A Brief History of the Universe by John Baez (December 7, 2008)
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timeline.html
Richard Sanderson and Philip Harrington, The Illustrated Timeline of the Universe: A
Crash Course in Words & Pictures. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2006.
We live in an expanding Universe, vast and ancient beyond ordinary human
understanding. The galaxies it contains are rushing away from one another, the
remnants of an immense explosion, the Big Bang.
Some scientists think our Universe may be one of a vast number--perhaps an infinite
number--of other closed-off universes. Some may grow and then collapse, live and
die, in an instant. Others may expand forever. Some may be poised delicately and
undergo a large number--perhaps an infinite number--of expansions and contractions.
There may be different laws of Nature and different forms of matter in those other
universes. In many of them life may be impossible, there being no suns and planets,
or even no chemical elements more complicated than hydrogen and helium. Others
may have an intricacy, diversity and richness that dwarf our own. If those other
universes exist, we may never be able to plumb their secrets, much less visit them.
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Kelvin
Kelvin means "degrees Celsius above absolute zero". The
melting point of water is 273 Kelvin; the boiling point is 373
Kelvin.
Light year
The distance light travels through a vacuum in a year
(approximately 365 1/4 days). Light travels through a
vacuum at the rate of about 186,250 miles per second
(exactly 299,792,458 meters per second). A light year is
approximately 5,880 trillion miles (9,460 trillion km).
Parsec
About 3.26 light year, or about 19,170 trillion miles (30,840
trillion km).
Astronomical Unit (A.U.)
A measurement used within the solar system, which is
the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, or about
93 million miles (150 million kn).
The Universe
Most of the universe was greatly misunderstood until
the 20th century. The most common notion from the
time of the ancient Greek philosophers (600-300 B.C.)
until the end of the Middle Ages (5th –16th centuries)
was that a number of crystal spheres revolved about
the Earth, and that each of the planets, the Sun, and
Earth’s Moon occupied one of these spheres. All the
stars occupied the farthest spheres. There were only
about 6,000 stars known, those visible to the naked
eye (and about half of these were south of the equator,
so few Europeans had ever seen them).
1609
Galileo
In 1609 Galileo of Italy turned the first astronomical
telescope on the heavens. Galileo showed that the
Milky Way was not merely a whitish band across the
sky but consisted of a vast number of stars, far more
than the few thousand visible with the naked eye. His
observations also disproved the old idea of crystal
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spheres.
1924
Telescopes were powerful enough to show that many
cloudy patches in the sky consisted of millions of
stars far away from the Milky Way. This discovery
led to the recognition of the enormous complexity
and diversity of the universe.
What Happened before the Big Bang
The universe makes its own time. There
(by Dennis Overbye)
is no outside timekeeper. Space and time are part of
the universe, not the other way around…Some
physicists speculate that on the other side of Time
Zero is another universe going backward in time.
Others suggest that creation as we know it is
punctuated by an eternal dance of clashing island
universes…All these will remain just fancy ideas
until physicists have married Einstein’s gravity to
the paradoxical quantum laws that describe the
behavior of subatomic particles. Such a theory of
quantum gravity is needed to describe the universe
when it was so small and dense that even space and
time become fuzzy and discontinuous.
String Theory
At this moment, there are two pretenders to the
throne of that ultimate theory putative “theory of
everything,” which posits that the ultimate
constituents of nature are tiny vibrating strings
rather than points. String theorists have scored some
striking successes in the study of black holes, in
which matter has been compressed to catastrophic
densities similar to the Big Bang, but they have
made little progress with the Big Bang itself.
Loop Quantum Gravity
Loop quantum gravity is the result of applying
quantum strictures directly to Einstein’s equations.
This theory makes no pretensions to explaining
anything but gravity and space-time. But recently
Dr. Martin Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute
for Gravitational Physics found that using the
theory he could follow the evolution of the
universe back past the alleged beginning point:
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instead of having a “zero moment” of infinite
density, the universe behaved as if it were
contracting from an earlier phase.
Big Bang is Here and Now
Dr. John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton has put
forth that, according to quantum theory’s famous
uncertainty principle, the properties of a subatomic
particle like its momentum or position remain in
abeyance, in a sort of fog of possibility until
something measures it or hits it. Likewise he has
wondered out loud if the universe bootstraps itself
into being by the accumulation of billions upon
billions of quantum interactions—the universe
stepping on its own feet, microscopically, and
bumbling itself awake. It’s a notion he calls “it
from bit” to emphasize a proposed connection
between quantum mechanics and information
theory. One implication of Wheeler’s quantum
genesis is that the notion of the creation of the
universe as something far away and long ago must
go…If the creation of the universe happens outside
time, then it must happen all the time. The Big
Bang is here and now, the foundation of every
moment.
The Big Bang
13.73 billion years ago
The universe is about 13.73 ( ± 0.12) billion years
old, and that the diameter of the observable Universe
is at least 93 billion light years, based on
observations of the cosmic microwave background
radiation.
A millionth of a second after the Big Bang In explaining gravity as the “bending”
of space-time geometry, Einstein’s theory predicted
the expansion of the universe. By imagining the
expansion going backward, like a film in reverse,
cosmologists have traced the history of the universe
back to a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.
3 key observations support the Big Bang theory:
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1) Hubble’s Law shows that all galaxies are moving
away from one another. This results from the
expansion of the universe and implies that the
universe evolved from an earlier dense, compact
point.
2) the universe is observed to be composed of
roughly 75 percent hydrogen (by number) and 25
percent helium. This explains the extremely hot
moments after the Big Bang, when the universe was
hot enough to produce matter from energy (E=mc2)
and fuse hydrogen into helium.
3) a faint glow of radio-wavelength radiation is
observed coming from every direction in the universe.
The 2.7 K background radiation (2.726 Kelvin)
known as cosmic background radiation, was
discovered in 1965 by Arno A. Penzias and Robert W.
Wilson of Bell Laboratory. The radiation is the
remnant of heat from the Big Bang, weakened by the
stretching of space since the Big Bang.
How 13.73 billion years are arrived
The speed of galaxies combined with their
distances from one another gives an estimate of the
time they have been receding from one another and
therefore of the time since the Big Bang. Careful
measurements of the recession rate and the cosmic
background radiation combine to give an age of the
universe of 13.73 billion years.
History of the Big Bang Theory
This type of big-bang universe was proposed
by Alexander Friedmann and Abbé Georges Lemaître in
the 1920s, the modern version was developed by
George Gamow and colleagues in the 1940s, and
theorized by Robert Dicke of Princeton. Dicke had
calculated that we might still detect over the intervening
aeons the remnants of the creation of the universe,
when electromagnetic radiation would flow freely
throughout. Since temperature is related to wavelength,
Dicke said, the redshift would be so great, the radiation
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would not be visible light but, rather, very cool and
invisible microwave radiation. This radiation is now
called the three-degree cosmic background radiation
because that is how cool the red-shifted creation fire
appear (three Celsius degrees above absolute zero).
This is the most powerful evidence that the Big Bang
happened. That radiation is still flowing through the
universe today, detectable as the three-degree cosmic
background radiation.
Planck epoch
13.73 billion years ago, with the universe-wide flash
of light, an enormous amount of pure energy is
released into an infinite, three-dimensional void. The
Universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense
phase called the Planck epoch, in which all the
matter and energy of the observable Universe was
concentrated. Since the Planck epoch, the Universe
has been expanding to its present form. As the
universe expanded, it finally cooled down enough to
allow atoms to form and light to shine out across
open space. Energy clouds form as the initial cloud
travels away from Universe Central at the speed of
light. These clouds cool into galaxies. The accidental
discovery of that light back in 1964 convinced
astronomers that the Big Bang was a real event, not
just a theoretical construct.
Recent observations indicate that this expansion is
accelerating because of the dark energy, and that
most of the matter and energy in the Universe is
fundamentally different from that observed on Earth
and not directly observable. (Dark matter gravitates
as ordinary matter, and thus works to slow the
expansion of the Universe; by contrast, dark energy
accelerates its expansion.)
(Think about the “thing” with our base of knowledge: There is an infinite void with
nothing in it, all dark as there was no light. Then something exploded and expanded
into our universe. So, there is a border between our universe and the void. But what is
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the border of the void? And what is outside of the void?)
At that early stage of the Big Bang, the condition of
the universe was very simple. Some regions were a
tiny bit denser than average and some a little more
sparse. Most of the stuff in it—then and still
today—was the mysterious dark matter that nobody
has yet identified, largely because it doesn’t produce
light of any sort. The rest was mostly hydrogen, with
a bit of helium mixed in. So far, the universe hadn’t
done much of anything.
13. 72996 billion years
400,000 years later, the cosmos had cooled to about
the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing
subatomic particles to combine for the first time into
atoms. The last burst of light from the Big Bang
shone forth at that time; it is still detectable today in
the form of a faint whisper of microwaves streaming
from all directions in space. The discovery of those
microwaves in 1964 confirmed the existence of the
Big Bang.
Dark Ages
13.7296-13.3 billion years
It’s the 400 million-year period (more or less) after
the last flash of light from the Big Bang faded and the
first blush of sun-like stars began to appear. The Dark
Ages refer to the period after the formation of
hydrogen and before the first stars.
500,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos went
dark. 400 million years later, baby galaxies began to
shine. What happened in between laid the
foundations for the modern universe.
At the start of the dark ages, there were no galaxies,
no stars, no planets. Even if there had been, we
wouldn’t be able to spot them. That’s because
hydrogen-gas clouds are nearly opaque to visible
light; no ordinary telescope will ever be able to see
what happened afterward.
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Energy to Matter
The pure energy is transformed into matter. The
building blocks of matter are atoms. The energy
forms and reforms into about 100 orderly types of
atoms, and even more sub-atomic particles, which
interact in a highly complex manner due to the void.
These atoms are merely pure energy fields of varying
complexity separated by oceans of nothingness.
Matter becomes clumps of these energy fields, as
they gravitate together while whirling through space.
Everything is matter, from a quasar to a hydrogen
molecule to a life-form. Apparently, this is how pure
energy reacts when entering an infinite void.
The cosmos was a formless sea of particles; by the
time it ended, just a couple hundred million years
later, the universe was alight with young stars
gathered into nascent galaxies. It was during the Dark
Ages that the chemical elements we know so
well—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and most of the
rest—we first forged out of primordial hydrogen and
helium. And it was during this time that the great
structures of the modern universe—super-clusters of
thousands of galaxies stretching across million of
light-years—began to assemble.
At first, the gravity was the only force at work.
Regions of higher density drew matter to them,
becoming denser still. Eventually, clouds of hydrogen
became so dense that their cores ignited with the fires
of thermonuclear reactions—the sustained
hydrogen-bomb explosions, in essence, that we know
as stars.
Accounting for a bigger portion of matter than
ordinary atoms, dark-matter particles were spread
unevenly through the cosmos; areas of higher
concentration drew in hydrogen and helium gas,
gradually forming the first stars dense enough to
burst into thermonuclear flame.
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The earliest stars
A star is a body of gas of base elements—mostly
13.3 billion years ago
hydrogen and helium--large enough to undergo
fusion reactions (hydrogen fusing into helium) in its
core. As the result of the energy produced from this
fusion, a star emits a tremendous amount of heat,
light, and electromagnetic radiations at other
wavelengths.
The earliest stars were massive, weighing in at 20 to
more than 100 times the mass of our sun. The
crushing pressures at their cores made them burn
through their nuclear fuel in only a million years or
so and caused them to spew radiation so intense that
it kept other stars from forming. The first “galaxies”
might have consisted of clouds of hydrogen and
helium surrounding just one mega-star.
End of the Dark Ages and the death of the mega-stars The death of the
mega-stars triggered the formation of normal stars,
creating the first recognizable dwarf galaxies. Their
radiation in turn burned through the remaining
shrouds of hydrogen, bringing the dark ages to a
close.
Galaxies formed
Size of the Universe
13 billion years ago.
Our universe is consisted of about 100 billion
(100,000,000,000, or1,000 億) galaxies (星系), one
of which is the Milky Way, our galaxy. Each galaxy
is consisted of about 100 billion stars (恆星). The
farthest star we can detect so far is about 13,900,000
billion kilometers away.
On average, there is 1 galaxy for every million
trillion cubic light-years of space, and 1 star for every
billion cubic light-years.
The universe is almost entirely empty, dark space.
In less than every minute, the universe will increase
its volume by 1 trillion cubic light-years, propelled
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by the force of its explosive birth 15 billion years ago.
The universe is expanding like an inflating balloon.
Albert Einstein mathematically predicted the
expansion of the universe as a side effect of his
theory of general relativity in 1916 (theory of special
relativity was in 1905), but the idea was so
revolutionary at the time that even Einstein himself
balked at the implication of his own equations. The
fact that the universe is expanding and the galaxies
are receding from each other was proved as a fact
first by astronomer Vesto Slipher using telescope at
the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.
1 million pages = 50-story building
1 billion pages = 10 times higher than Mount Everest
1 trillion pages = 1/4 way to the Moon
1 million seconds = 12 days
1 billion seconds > 31 years
1 trillion seconds = 300 centuries (30,000 years)
If the Earth’s orbit is the size of a dime, most stars are dust-sized. The average
distance between stars is about 1 kilometer. The entire Milky Way Galaxy is as wide
as the diameter of the Earth.
Structure of the Universe
The universe is like soap bubbles, around the
“surfaces” of voids (bubbles) lie the galaxy
superclusters. Where two voids meet, a sheet of
galaxies is likely; zones of multiple intersections
seem to produce dense ribbons and tendrils of
galaxies. The junctions of several void surfaces at
one site can generate the most populous knots,
marking the cores of galaxy superclusters.
Stars
Stars are spheres of gas that generate energy by
nuclear fusion. Their life cycles are responsible for
the rich chemical complexity of the universe and are
intimately connected to the existence of life. Since
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soon after the beginning of the universe, stars have
been forming and then producing heavy elements as
a byproduct of energy generation at their cores.
When their nuclear fuel is exhausted, some of these
fusion products are released back into space, in the
process enriching the interstellar medium, the raw
materials for formation of subsequent generations of
stars.
Interstellar Medium
The space between stars is vast (typically tens of
trillions of miles between pairs of stars), and that
space is not empty. Astronomers refer to this space as
interstellar space; the material distributed throughout
interstellar space is referred to as the interstellar
medium. The interstellar medium is composed of
thinly spread gas atoms, mostly hydrogen with a
smaller amount of helium, and traces of other
elements, as well as a small amount of dusty solid
material. These gas atoms are so thinly spread that a
cube-shape region 500 miles on a side contains only
about a gram of matter.
Star Formation
Forming a star from such diffuse material requires
compacting interstellar gas by a trillion trillion times.
Most star formation occurs in denser accumulations
of interstellar gas called Giant Molecular Clouds, so
called because they contain enough raw material,
mostly in the form of hydrogen molecules, to make
hundreds of thousands of stars. In these clouds, the
gas can be thousands of times denser than average
but even colder, reaching temperatures of 10 Kelvins
(less than –400 degree F.) Giant Molecular Clouds
are found in the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The
formation of individual stars occur in denser clumps
within Giant Molecular Clouds, where gravity pulls
together the million trillion trillion kilograms of
interstellar materials necessary to make a star.
Protostar 原始恆星
The accumulated matter is known as a protostar,
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enough raw material to make a star but not yet
producing energy through nuclear fusion. Although
there are tantalizing clues, astronomers have yet to
definitively observe the initial gravitational infall
needed to form a protostar, though later stages have
been seen. Observations also show that collapse is
accompanied by the formation of a disk of interstellar
material around the protostar’s equator; this
Protoplanetary Disk
protoplanetary disk is presumably the material from
which planets form.
Birth of a Star
As more material accumulates, the central
temperature of the protostar reaches the millions of
degrees necessary for hydrogen atoms to combine to
form helium. The threshold temperature for hydrogen
fusion, sometimes referred to as the proton-proton
chain, is 10 to 14 million K, or 10 to 14 million
degrees Kelvin. The mass of helium produced in
these reactions is smaller than the initial hydrogen;
the difference is converted to energy (E=mc2). The
onset of fusion marks the true birth of the star.
Main-sequence Stars
After a period during which the star settles into its
final configuration and surrounding cloud material is
cleared away, the star becomes a stable
main-sequence star, steadily converting hydrogen to
helium in its hottest central regions. The
main-sequence phase in a star’s life lasts far longer
than a star’s formation or death. The stable structure
arises from the balance between gravity, trying to
compress the star; and internal pressure, generated by
energy released in the nuclear reactions, pushing
outward. Since the fuel for nuclear fusion is
hydrogen, and since stars are made of enormous
quantities of this fuel, the main-sequence stage can
continue for millions or billions or years. Although
high-mass stars contain more hydrogen fuel than
low-mass stars, they have higher power outputs and
run through the available hydrogen faster. The
highest-mass stars use up their nuclear fuel in a few
12
million years The Sun has enough fuel to last 10
billion years; the smallest stars will take hundreds of
billions of years to run through their fuel.
Multiples Stars Forming
Within Giant Molecular Clouds, stars form in groups
of hundreds or thousands of stars, and a Giant
Molecular Cloud may experience multiple episodes
Smallest Stars
of star formation. The smallest stars have masses of
about 1/12 the Sun’s masses. Below this mass, the
Brown Dwarfs
center of a hydrogen gas sphere does not reach high
enough temperatures to fuse hydrogen into helium.
An object below this mass is known as a brown
High-mass Stars
dwarf. Stars form with masses up to about 100 times
the Sun’s mass. The smaller the mass, the more stars
of that mass there are; stars smaller than the Sun are
the most common; high-mass stars are rare.
Post-Main-Sequence Stage
Death of Stars
As hydrogen is replaced by helium in a stellar core, a
star enters the post-main-sequence stage. The core
shrinks and becomes hotter, allowing helium fusion
to begin, increasing the nuclear reaction rate and
power output of the star. The star’s outer layers
Red Giants
expand to 100-1,000 times the main-sequence
diameter and become cooler. This is known as the red
giant phase.
In lower-mass stars like the Sun, atoms as massive as
carbon and oxygen are formed at the core. The
expanded outer layers begin to flow away from the
core, dispersing back into interstellar space during the
planetary nebula phase. The remaining stellar core,
composed of carbon, oxygen, and electrons, has
about the mass of the Sun but with a
White Dwarfs
diameter about the same as Earth. This remnant of a
low-mass star’s life is a white dwarf. The large
gravitational force trying to collapse the core is offset
by a quantum effect, electron degeneracy 衰亡
pressure, which prevents electrons from occupying
the same space and as a result provides an outward
force to hold up the core.
In higher-mass stars, central pressures are high
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enough to allow additional fusion reactions,
producing heavier elements like silicon, sulfur, and
iron. The resulting internal structure is onion-like,
with layers of earlier fusion products lying atop the
stellar core. When iron is formed in the core, no other
fusion reactions can occur without removing pressure
from the system, and the core rapidly collapses. If the
core mass is less than three times the mass of the Sun,
collapse is halted by neutron degeneracy pressure
when the core is about 10 kilometers across. The
Neutron Stars
resulting high-density object is a neutron star. As
neutron pressure halts collapse of the core, the
resulting rebound ejects the star’s outer layers back
Supernovae
into interstellar space in a supernova explosion. The
interstellar medium is thereby enriched with heavy
elements, including elements such as carbon, oxygen,
iron, sulfur, and phosphorous, which are crucial to
life on Earth. The Sun and Earth presumably formed
from supernova-enriched interstellar gas.
Black Holes
In stars where the core mass exceeds three times the
Sun’s mass, even neutron pressure cannot halt the
collapse once all core fuel sources have been
exhausted. The core collapses to an infinitely dense
mass called a black hole. The gravitational force
within a few tens of kilometers of such a stellar black
hole is so strong that even light cannot escape from it.
The precise fate of the star’s outer layers is not clear.
Since high-mass stars are rare, few possible stellar
black holes have been identified, and none has been
observed during the collapse phase.
Size of the Milky Way
It is composed of gas and dust and about 400 billion
(400,000,000,000) stars or suns. The oldest star yet
discovered in the Milky Way, HE 1523-0901, is
estimated to be about 13.2 billion years old.
Sun
4.6 billion years ago
The Solar System formed from the gravitational
collapse of a giant molecular cloud 4.6 billion years
14
ago. This initial cloud was likely several light-years
across and probably birthed several stars. As the
region that would become the Solar System, known
as the pre-solar nebula, collapsed, conservation of
angular momentum made it rotate faster. The centre,
where most of the mass collected, became
increasingly hotter than the surrounding disc. As the
contracting nebula 星雲 rotated, it began to flatten into
a spinning protoplanetary disc with a diameter of
roughly 200 AU (astronomical unit--a unit of
distance equal to the average distance between the
earth and the sun, approximately 150 million
kilometers (93 million miles), and a hot, dense
protostar at the centre. At this point in its evolution,
the Sun is believed to have been a T Tauri star.
Studies of T Tauri stars show that they are often
accompanied by discs of pre-planetary matter with
masses of 0.001–0.1 solar masses, with the vast
majority of the mass of the nebula in the star itself.
The planets formed by accretion from this disk.
(picture: birth of a star)
(Hubble image of protoplanetary disks in the Orion
Nebula, a light-year-wide "stellar nursery" likely very
similar to the primordial nebula from which our Sun
formed.)
Within 50 million years, the pressure and density of
hydrogen in the centre of the protostar became great
enough for it to begin thermonuclear fusion. The
temperature, reaction rate, pressure, and density
increased until hydrostatic equilibrium was achieved,
with the thermal energy countering the force of
gravitational contraction. At this point the Sun
became a full-fledged main sequence star.
The Solar System as we know it today will last until
the Sun begins its evolution off of the main sequence
of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. As the Sun
burns through its supply of hydrogen fuel, the energy
15
output supporting the core tends to decrease, causing
it to collapse in on itself. This increase in pressure
heats the core, so it burns even faster. As a result, the
Sun is growing brighter at a rate of roughly ten
percent every 1.1 billion years.
Around 5.4 billion years from now, the hydrogen in
the core of the Sun will have been entirely converted
to helium, ending the main sequence phase. At this
time, the outer layers of the Sun will expand to
roughly up to 260 times its current diameter; the Sun
will become a red giant. Because of its vastly
increased surface area, the surface of the Sun will be
considerably cooler than it is on the main sequence
(2600 K at the coolest).
Eventually, the Sun's outer layers will fall away,
leaving a white dwarf, an extraordinarily dense object,
half the original mass of the Sun but only the size of
the Earth. The ejected outer layers will form what is
known as a planetary nebula, returning some of the
material that formed the Sun to the interstellar
medium.
(picture: Red giant sun)
(Artist's conception of the future evolution of our Sun.
Left: main sequence; middle: red giant; right: white
dwarf.)
Around the Sun are planets, moons, asteroids and
comets. The Sun contains 99.86 percent of the
system's known mass and dominates it
gravitationally.
(picture: Pie chart of the masses of the bodies of the Solar System)
Solar System
Formation
Our solar system was formed after the supernova 超級
新星 of a previous star sent out debris. The Sun and
planets formed in a proto-stellar nebula cloud (星雲) as
gases and asteroids gravitated and collided, which
generated heat and formed the amorphous 無定形的 globs
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into spheres approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The
sphere is so common because it is the base form of the
third dimension formed by gravity. On average,
supernovae occur about once every 50 years in a galaxy
the size of the Milky Way.
We have sent spacecraft to examine seventy of the other
worlds in our system, and to enter the atmospheres or
land on the surfaces of four of them--the Moon, Venus,
Mars and Jupiter.
(picture: solar_system)
Content of the
Solar System
The solar system comprises a single star, the Sun, and
all of the objects that orbit the Sun, bound to it by
gravity. The Sun's retinue of objects circle it in a nearly
flat disc called the ecliptic plane, most of the mass of
which is contained within eight relatively solitary
planets whose orbits are almost circular.
Planets
The largest objects that orbit the Sun are
referred to as planets 行星. These planets are grouped
broadly into two categories: the terrestrial planets and
the gas giants. The terrestrial planets are the 4 closest to
the Sun:
(picture: Terrestrial planets)
Mercury 水星, Venus 金星, Earth, and Mars 火星. These
are composed primarily of silicon-based rocks that form
their crusts and mantles, and metals such as iron and
nickel that form their cores. The Earth is the largest of
the terrestrial planets, slightly more massive than Venus,
10 times as massive as Mars, and nearly 20 times the
mass of Mercury.
The gas giants, or Jovian planets, including Jupiter 木星,
Saturn 土星, Uranus 天王星, and Neptune 海王星, are
composed largely of hydrogen and helium and are far
more massive than the terrestrials. The 4 gas giants
collectively make up 99 percent of the mass known to
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orbit the Sun. Jupiter, at more than 300 times the Earth’s
mass, is the largest object in the solar system besides
the Sun. Jupiter and Saturn are composed mostly of
hydrogen gas. Uranus and Neptune, each approximately
15 times the mass of Earth, are composed of icy cores
surrounded by substantial hydrogen atmospheres.
(picture: Pie chart of the masses of the Solar planets)
Dwarf Planets
Within the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt are the 5
dwarf planets, Ceres is in the asteroid belt; Pluto 冥王星,
Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is
approximately the same size as the Moon, and the rest are
much smaller. They are composed primarily of ice. Their
orbits are somewhat erratic.
Asteroids 小行星
Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets or planetoids, are
small objects with compositions similar to the terrestrial
planets that orbit around the Sun. Asteroids are found
primarily in the asteroid belt, a band lying between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Smaller numbers are found in
orbit that cross those of the terrestrial planets, including
Earth’s orbit, and leading or trailing several planets. The
largest of the asteroids, Ceres—now known as one of the
dwarf planets--is nearly half the diameter of Pluto, though
most are much smaller, with diameters of several
kilometers. More than 200,000 asteroids are now known.
(picture: asteroid belt)
Comets 彗星
Comets are icy bodies, composed mostly of water ice and
carbon dioxide ice. When far from the Sun, comets are
essentially in deep freeze, but if a comet’s orbit carries it
closer to the Sun than Jupiter, significant amounts of the
ice evaporate and trail away from the main body of the
comet, forming the comet’s distinctive tail. As the ice
evaporates, small solid grainlike particles mixed in with
the ice are also released. The main body of a comet may
be only a few kilometers in diameter, but upon close
18
approach to the Sun, the tail may extend for millions of
kilometers.
Two different locations are recognized as sources of
comets. Long-period comets, ones that take more than
several hundred years to complete an orbit of the Sun, are
thought to come from the Oort Cloud, a large group of as
many as a million comets located 50,000 times farther
from the Sun than Earth, halfway to the next nearest star.
Small gravitational perturbations occasionally sling one or
more of these toward the Sun. Some end up on long,
repeating elliptical orbits; others make a single pass by the
Sun and are flung out of the solar system, while some
crash into the Sun. Short-period comets move on elliptical
orbits that take them out no farther than the orbit of Pluto.
The source of short-period comets is now thought to be a
recently discovered group of icy objects just outside of
Neptune’s orbit called the Kuiper Belt. The first Kuiper
Belt object was discovered in 1992, and hundreds have
now been discovered, including four with at least
one-third the diameter of Pluto.
(picture: Kuiper belt)
(picture: solar_system and Kuiper Belt)
Inner Solar System
The inner Solar System refers to the region comprising the
terrestrial planets and asteroids. Composed mainly of
silicates and metals, the objects of the inner Solar System
huddle very closely to the Sun; the radius of this entire
region is shorter than the distance between Jupiter and
Saturn.
Outer Solar System
The outer Solar System is home to the gas giants and their
planet-sized moons. Many short period comets, including
the centaurs, also orbit in this region.
(picture: Inner_Outer solar system)
Extra-solar Planets
Until 1995, only the planets around the Sun were known.
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Since then, over 200 planets have been discovered orbiting
stars outside the solar system, as well as some planet-mass
objects that are not in orbit around stars. As potential
planets are found in increasing numbers, Dr. Alan P. Boss
of the Carnegie Institution of Washington said, the odds
increase that planets and planetary systems like Earth’s
would be found. Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space
Telescope Science Institute said, “There are literally
billions of planets in our galaxy.”
Moons
All of the planets except Mercury and Venus have moons,
or natural satellites, in orbit around them. Only three
moons are known to orbit the terrestrial planets: the Moon,
in orbit around the Earth; and two much smaller objects in
orbit about Mars. The Jovian planets, however, are
accompanied by large number of moons. Until 2007, 61
moons are discovered orbiting around Jupiter, ranging in
size from larger than Mercury to as small as a kilometer in
diameter. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have 31, 27, and
13 known moons, respectively.
Much still unknown
Much of our Solar System is still unknown. The Sun's
gravitational field is estimated to dominate the
gravitational forces of surrounding stars out to about two
light years (125,000 AU). Lower estimates for the radius
of the Oort cloud, by contrast, do not place it farther than
50,000 AU. Despite discoveries such as Sedna, the region
between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, an area tens
of thousands of AU in radius, is still virtually unmapped.
There are also ongoing studies of the region between
Mercury and the Sun. Objects may yet be discovered in
the Solar System's uncharted regions.
Earth
4.567 billion years old
4.567 billion years old (evidence from radiometric
放射性元素 dating indicates that the Earth is about 4.567
billion years old.) The Earth is a semi-solid satellite of
that insignificant star our Sun. There are 10 such
satellites, or planets, in our solar system. We are on the
20
third from the Sun.
It is thought that the Earth itself coalesced 聯合 from
material in orbit around the Sun roughly 4.56 billion
years ago and may have been struck by a very large
(Mars-sized) planetesimal shortly after it formed,
splitting off material that came together to form the
Moon (Giant impact theory). A stable crust was
apparently in place by 4.4 billion years ago, since zircon
crystals from Western Australia have been dated at
4404 Ma.
The Earth’s initial atmosphere was stripped by solar
winds, but a new one formed from the condensing
material. It contained a large amount of water vapor,
which cooled and covered most of the planets surface
with water. The oceans are the Earth’s most
distinguishing feature. The continents are the less dense
solid materials which have been pushed to the surface
by the weight of all that water. They are broken up
pieces of earth which float with the oceans on a gigantic
sea of molten rock. And, beneath that molten sea lies a
hyper-dense core.
On the surface, the oceans, continents, and atmosphere
create a thin layer of converging liquid, solid, and gas
energy which drives a highly complex system of
weather, currents, and continental drifting. The
atmosphere of this layer was comprised of carbon
dioxide as well as ammonia and methane. In the
estuaries, organic molecules, which are found even in
meteors, mixed with the volatile air, well-placed
minerals, water, and converging energies. They
combined to form carbon-based molecules which
maintain their own energy, keeping it, and using it to
create more of themselves, or life.
Sun light reaches Earth in 8 minutes and 18 seconds.
21
The Moon
It is thought that shortly after the Earth was formed 4.56
billion years ago, a very large (Mars-sized) planetesimal
struck the Earth, splitting off material that came together
to form the Moon (Giant impact theory). The present
hypothesis is that the Moon was formed when the collision
of a large protoplanet stripped material from the Earth’s
crust.
The Moon is over one-quarter the size of Earth in diameter.
It is slightly egg-shaped, and the same side of the Moon
always faces Earth—this side being the elongated small
end. Over a decade of exploration of the Moon by space
probes was capped by the landing of 2 U.S. astronauts on
the Moon on July 20, 1969. A total of 6 two-man crews of
American astronauts eventually landed on the Moon
between 1969 and 1972, and they brought back some 842
pounds of samples of Moon rocks.
The Moon is airless and devoid of life. Temperatures on
the Moon range from up to 273 degree Fahrenheit (134
degree Centigrade) on the bright side to –274 degree F.
(-170 degree C.) on the unlighted side. A mixture of fine
powder and broken rock blankets the Moon’s surface. The
lunar surface is pockmarked with craters and larger impact
basins, the largest about 1,300 miles across, and is broken
by huge mountain ranges. Some craters at the poles may
contain frozen water in their depths.
4.5 billion-540 million years ago
Precambrian Period
The Precambrian is an informal name for the
supereon comprising the eons of the geologic timescale
that came before the current Phanerozoic eon. It spans from
the formation of Earth around 4.5 billions years ago to the
evolution of abundant macroscopic hard-shelled animals,
which marked the beginning of the Cambrian Period, the
first period of the first era of the Phanerozoic eon, some 542
million years ago. Very little is known about the
Precambrian, despite it making up roughly seven-eighths of
22
the Earth's history, and what little is known has largely been
discovered in the past four or five decades. The
Precambrian fossil record is poor, and those fossils present
(e.g. stromatolites) are of limited biostratigraphic use. Many
Precambrian rocks are heavily metamorphosed, obscuring
their origins, while others have either been destroyed by
erosion, or remain deeply buried beneath Phanerozoic
strata.
Life on Earth
4 billion years ago
Began 4 billion years ago. As our young planet, still in
the throes of volcanic eruptions and battered by
falling comets and asteroids, remained inhospitable
to life for about half a billion years after its birth,
there were suggestions that germs of life may have
come to earth from outer space with cometary dust or
even, as proposed by Francis Crick of DNA
double-helix fame, on a spaceship sent out by some
distant civilization.
There are about 50 billion species that have grown up
and evolved on Earth. Humans are one of them.
Single Cells
A living cell is a complex construction of proteins,
which are highly complex carbon molecules built of
amino acids. As with fission, complexity equals
energy, and all living things are a complex
construction of stored energy. Life succeeded as
anaerobic 沒有氣而能生活的 viruses and bacteria,
until a strain of bacterium was able to form
chlorophyll and actually tap the Sun for energy.
The history of life on earth is written in the cells and
molecules of existing organisms. Thanks to the
advances of cell biology, biochemistry and molecular
biology, scientists are becoming increasingly adept at
reading the text.
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Advanced Bacteria Life on Earth
Advanced forms of life existed on earth
3.55 billion years ago
at least 3.55 billion years ago. In rocks of that age,
fossilized imprints have been found of bacteria that
look uncannily like cyanobacteria, the most highly
evolved photosynthetic organisms present in the
world today.
1st major Ice Age
2.7 to 2.3 billion years ago.
Algae in ocean
2.1 billion years ago
The appearance of plants meant extinction for most of the
other life-forms, as lethal oxygen entered this converging
layer and pushed the existing gases out, thus wiping
out the life-forms which had already evolved to the
previous atmosphere. The Sun’s energy enhanced the
primordial plant bacteria enough that they were able
to dominate the planet. Along with the plants came
their animal companions.
2nd major Ice Age
850 to 630 million years ago and may have produced
a Snowball Earth in which permanent ice covered the
entire globe.
Unicellular animal in ocean
700 millions years ago
Animals evolved from an opportune
oxygen-needing bacteria which was able to balance
the plants’ needs for waste disposal and recycling.
Chlorophyll-using plants and their co-evolutionary
animal partners spread throughout the oceans. The
plants polluted the water with oxygen, which took all
of the iron out of the oceans. Life-forms were turning
the converging layer into their realm. Life also
polluted the atmosphere, so that inert nitrogen and
flammable oxygen would allow for the eventual
colonizing of the earth. Carbon dioxide has almost
been eliminated, but it is still used for maintaining
temperature. Life also put into place the ozone layer,
which strains ultraviolet light for the earth as the
oceans do for the sea life, as well as sending needed
24
sulfur and iodine from the sea, and there are a
multitude of microbiologia which keep the saline 鹽的
content of the water the same as it was when life first
formed or the salt run off from the continents would
have killed off all aerobic 需氧的 life millions of years
ago.
575 million years ago
The first animal fossils, known as the Ediacaran or
Vendian biota, are simple organisms appear to be the
precursors of modern animal phyla 門.
545 - 488.3 million years ago
Cambrian period--marked a profound change in
Cambrian period
life on Earth, the first period of the Phanerozoic eon.
During this period, mineralized-hence readily
fossilized- organisms became common. This
diversification of lifeforms was relatively rapid, and
is termed the Cambrian explosion. This explosion
produced the first representatives of most modern
phyla 門, but on the whole, most Cambrian animals look
alien to today's eyes, falling in the evolutionary stems of
modern groups. While life prospered in the oceans, the
land was barren - with nothing more than a microbial
'crud' gracing the soils. Apart from tentative evidence
suggesting that some animals floundered around on
land, most of the continents resembled deserts spanning
from horizon to horizon. Shallow seas flanked the
margins of several continents, which had resulted from
the relatively recent breakup of the preceding
supercontinent Pannotia. The seas were relatively warm,
and polar ice was absent.
545 millions years ago-now
It covers roughly 545 million years and goes back to
Phanerozoic eon
the time when diverse hard-shelled animals first
appeared--the Cambrian period. The time span of the
Phanerozoic includes the rapid emergence of a number
of animal phyla; the evolution of these phyla into
diverse forms; the emergence of terrestrial plants; the
development of complex plants; the evolution of fish;
25
the emergence of terrestrial animals; and the
development of modern faunas. During the period
covered, continents drifted about, eventually collecting
into a single landmass known as Pangea and then
splitting up into the current continental landmasses.
Echinoderms (starfish etc), Sponges In the seas, life took a turn for the complex,
and Coelenterates (jellyfish etc)
as single cell animal life gathered together to
540 million years ago
form a supra-conscious body-colony of cells united to
utilize more energy. Each cell in the colony sacrificed
its independence to gain a survival advantage. The
cells gathered together to form into organs which
work at separate jobs to keep the whole colony of
cells well fed and alive long enough to reproduce.
Molluscs 軟體動物
Crustaceans 甲殼綱動物
Many sensory, food trapping, and movement devices, as
well as other adaptations were experimented with. The
530 million years ago
design to build any particular life-form is written in its
highly complex, double helix DNA molecule, or its
genes. Mutations do occur and there is change, because
life-forms need to be able to adapt to the continually
changing conditions on the Earth’s surface. There is
also a tendency to develop more and more complex
life-forms, thus utilizing more and more energy.
500 million years ago
arthropods emerged
Arthropods 節肢動物 (crustaceans 甲殼綱動物, insects,
arachnids 蛛形綱動物, and similar animals) emerged
from the sea and began
from the sea and began to colonize the land.
to colonize the land
These supra-conscious body-colonies went through the
myriad of forms of requisite variety initially, but then
settled down to only a few animal forms. Humans
evolved from the Vertebrates which survived through
adaptation and chance. The supra-conscious of the
body-colony is a rudimentary intelligence, but
Jawless vertebrates
470 million years ago
Vertebrates have an advantage, since their nervous
system connects their senses to a central brain, which
is an organ to house the supra-conscious. The brain
26
processes the large amount of information being
collected by the senses and reacts to it. They soon
became the dominant animal life-forms. Plants were
not too far behind animals in forming complex
body-colonies.
3rd major Ice Age
460 to 430 million years ago.
Land plants, Fungi
450 million years ago
Eventually, life had spread throughout the coastal
oceans. The earth was next as insects were following
the plants on to the land and into the air in an age of
abundance which created the Earth’s great coal fields.
Plant life began its takeover of the Earth's land
surfaces about 475 million years ago.
Vertebrates with jaws
410 million years ago
Insects
400 million years ago
Armored Fish
390 million years ago
From the ocean, the armored fish came after the
abundant insects in the rivers. These fish evolved
from early Vertebrates. Their armor was eventually
shed and bones formed on the inside to store calcium
in the fresh water. These bony fish then exploded
back into the sea, which they still dominate, as well
as exploding on to the land after the insects, where
their land-based relatives also still dominate. The
semi-aquatic amphibians had their age of dominance,
then the pure-terrestrial reptiles came.
Land vertebrates
380 million years ago
4th major Ice Age
350 to 260 million years ago.
27
Amphibians, Reptiles
300 million years ago
1st land animal
5th major Ice Age
Two varieties of reptile, true reptiles and
mammal-like reptiles, competed for dominance next.
The mammal-like reptiles were ahead until a comet
or asteroid hit the planet and changed everything.
True Reptiles and conifer plants soon spread across
the entire earth’s surface.
280 million years ago.
Began 40 million years ago with the growth of an ice
sheet in Antarctica. It intensified around 3 million
years ago, with the spread of ice sheets in the
Northern Hemisphere. Since then, the world has seen
cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and
retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales.
The most recent glacial period ended about ten
thousand years ago.
Ice Ages and Earth’s Climate
Within the ice ages (or at least within the last one),
more temperate and more severe periods occur. The
colder periods are called 'glacial periods', the warmer
periods 'interglacials'.
Glacials are characterized by cooler and drier
climates over most of the Earth and large land and
sea ice masses extending outward from the poles.
Mountain glaciers in otherwise unglaciated areas
extend to lower elevations due to a lower snow line.
Sea levels drop due to the removal of large volumes
of water above sea level in the icecaps. There is
evidence that ocean circulation patterns are disrupted
by glaciations. Since the earth has significant
continental glaciation in the Arctic and Antarctic, we
are currently in a glacial minimum of a glaciation.
Such a period between glacial maxima is known as
an "interglacial".
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In each ice age, there is evidence that greenhouse gas
levels fell at the start of ice ages and rose during the
retreat of the ice sheets. So whether there are humans
on Earth or not, greenhouse gas levels change over
time. It is difficult to establish cause and effect of the
changes of greenhouse gas levels in the past, but the
movement of continents and volcano eruptions are
two of the causes.
The cycles of glaciation (but not the ice ages) are
attributed in large part to changes in the amount of
the Sun’s energy hitting the Earth at different times.
The relation of the Earth to the Sun changes over
long periods owing to periodic changes in the Earth’s
orbit, its movement relative to its axis (called
precession 歲差), and the tilt of the axis relative to the
Sun. Regardless of human-induced changes such as
the present so-called “global warming” or other
unexpected factors, the next cycle of cooling is
expected to begin in several thousand years.
The Earth is now in an interglacial period known as
the Holocene. Typical interglacial periods may last
between 12,000 and 28,000 years. During the last
800,000 years, the dominant period of
glacial-interglacial oscillation has been 100,000 years.
During the period 3,000,000 - 800,000 years ago, the
dominant pattern of glaciation corresponded to the
41,000 year period.
Predicted changes in orbital forcing suggest that the
next ice age would not begin before about 50,000
years from now, regardless of man-made global
warming. However anthropogenic forcing from
increased greenhouse gases should outweigh orbital
forcing for as long as intensive use of fossil fuels
continues.
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Earth’s Different Climates
Earth’s climate and environment have not generally
been as stable as the last 10,000 years (the Holocene
period). Rather, over the long history of the Earth,
substantial environmental change has been the norm.
In addition to the major Ice Ages mentioned above,
Climate during the last 1 million years
even the Earth’s climate during the past 1
million years has been characterized by a series of
glacial and interglacial periods. During most of this
period, Earth has been considerably colder, about 9
degree Fahrenheit (5 degree Celsius), than it is today,
and the sea level was much lower because water was
locked in immense ice sheets. For example, the
oceans were about 330 feet (100 meters) lower
during the last ice age (the one that ends 10,000 years
ago) than they are today. The most recent period of
warmth comparable to our current climate was the
Eemian interglacial, about 130,000 years ago.
The ice age cycles, although regular, have not been
without surprises: some episodes of climate change
within the larger pattern have come with startling
rapidity. For example, 13,000 years ago there was an
abrupt reversal of warming trends, leading to a drop
in temperatures of about 11 degree Fahrenheit (6
degrees Celsius), bringing renewed glacial conditions.
This event ended some 1,300 years later with a period
of rapid warming of 12-13 degrees Fahrenheit (7
degree Celsius). The Earth’s temperature and
environment is potentially instable.
Changes of the Earth’s land and sea
All of the Earth's oceanic crust is
completely replaced about every 200 million years,
changing weather and outlook of our Earth.
Conifers 松柏科植物, ferns 蕨類植物
300 million years
Conifer trees and the legendary dinosaurs
made the biosphere pulse with life, as the
vast forests fed grazing herds of massive brontosaurs,
which were fed on by the great carnosaurs, who were
30
so fierce that they even terrorized the oceans and the
skies.
1st dinosaurs
Mammals
220 million years ago
225 million years ago.
Mammals competed with the birds for dominance, but
mammals were more successful at grass digestion.
Bird-type dinosaurs
150 million years ago
Dinosaurs rule the Earth
136 million years ago.
Flowering plants and trees
135 million years ago. Flowering plants (angiosperms)
spread during the Cretaceous period 白堊紀
(145-65 million years ago). Their evolution was
aided by the appearance of bees.)
Birds, Bees
100 million years ago
Grasses on Earth
80 million years ago.
Dinosaurs died
Flowering trees, insects, and true mammals were
65 million years ago.
starting to change everything. Ironically, another
comet or asteroid hit the planet and wiped out 70% of
Earth’s species, including all of the dinosaurs, who
were already weakened by the rejection of the
conifers, which had become inedible evergreens, and
by the appearance of grasses, which are difficult to
digest.
Primates 靈長類動物
Through the line of the insectivore tree shrews came
63 million years ago
the family of primates, which branched out into
lemurs 狐猴, tarsiers 跗猴屬動物, monkeys, apes, and
hominids 人類祖先. All rely heavily on stereoscopic 有
立體感的 vision and grasping thumbs, which give the
more intelligent apes the ability to use primitive
tools.
21 million years ago
Apes split off from other monkeys.
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Apes split off from other monkeys
6-5 million years ago
According to the Chimpanzee Genome Project, both
human (Ardipithecus, Australopithecus and Homo)
and chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus)
lineages diverged from a common ancestor about 5 to
6 million years ago, if we assume a constant rate of
evolution.
Hominids 人類祖先.
5 million years ago. The hominids evolved on the
Earliest "human"
Savanna as a result of the formation of the Rift
Split off from other Apes
5 million years ago
Valley in eastern Africa. The new mountains created
new weather and the pigmy chimpanzees jungle safety
was replaced by violent grassland. Their choice was to
survive on the plains or die. They may have first gone
through an intermediary semi-aquatic stage living in the
rivers and losing their fur before pushing into the
grasslands. Life on the Savanna is radically different
from the safe confines of the jungle. They would have
to exploit their strengths. The earliest hominids used
simple tools and their large brain for better
implementation of those tools. They also had to develop
a taste for meat, which is the currency of life on the
Savanna. At first, they became scavengers of carcasses.
Later, these carnivorous apes began to hunt in bands.
Eventually, they would challenge the dominant lions
and hyenas.
The hominid’s brain size grew as their tool using ability,
hunting strategies, and communication skills grew. The
brain houses the supra-consciousness of the
body-colony, and the growth of the brain as a weapon
of survival is new to life on Earth. Humans believe they
are the only self-aware species, but all living things are
self-aware. Their large brains give humans only a more
complex self-awareness. Apes, dolphins, elephants, and
whales share this complex consciousness, but only
humans are able to use their hyper-complex brains to
32
affect their environment, thanks to their tool crafting
ability, which is what really separate humans from other
animals.
3.9 million years ago
First Australopithecus
The genus Australopithecus is a genus of extinct
hominids, made up of the gracile australopiths, and
formerly also included their larger relatives, the robust
australopiths (which are now given their own genus).
The genus Australopithecus is closely related to the
human genus Homo, and may be ancestral to it. Gracile
australopiths shared several traits with modern apes and
humans, and were widespread throughout Eastern and
Northern Africa by a time between 3.9 and 3.0 million
years ago.
Quaternary Ice Age begins
Intensification of present Icehouse conditions; cool
2.58 million years ago
and dry climate.
2.5 million years ago
First Homo habilis.
First Homo habilis.
Stone tools—earliest technology
better tools called Oldowan pebble tools, were
medium-size rocks broken to have a sharp edge.
The human genus 屬
Homo erectus (Latin: upright man) was extremely
(Homo erectus 直立猿人)
successful. Homo erectus is a descendant of earlier
2 million years ago
hominins such as Australopithecus and early Homo
species (e.g., Homo habilis). They evolved in Africa and
were the first hominin to leave Africa and migrate to
Eurasia. Fossilized remains 1.8 and 1.0 million years old
have been found in Africa (e.g., Lake Turkana and
Olduvai Gorge), Europe (Georgia, Spain), Indonesia (e.g.,
Sangiran and Trinil), Vietnam, and China (e.g., Shaanxi).
Homo erectus eventually died out without leaving
descendents. Homo erectus harnessed fire and created
stone weapons and tools. Two varieties of linguistic
hominids 人類祖先 came from erectus, the visual
Neanderthals and the vocal sapiens. The vocal sapiens
proved more successful and quickly spread over the entire
33
earth. 99.5% of the time since our species Homo came to
be, we were hunters and wanderers. We worked in groups
to protect our children from lions and the hyenas. We
moved on to find a better place when the drought was
prolonged.
1.5 million years ago
stone ax
fire
Java Man
700,000 years ago
Specialized stone tools like the hand ax, which had
sharpened edges on both sides were invented.
The earliest evidence that humans used fire is more than 1.5
million years old.
Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois found a species from the
bank of the Solo River at Trinil, in East Java, commonly
referred to as "Java Man."
750,000-200,000 years ago
Zhoukoudian is a cave system in Beijing in China,
Peking Man
where one of the first specimens of Homo erectus, dubbed
Homo erectus
“Peking Man,” were discovered in 1921 and 1923. About
45 individuals of this Peking Man species lived in this
cave approximately 200,000 to 750,000 years ago. All
original Homo erectus bones were lost in China in World
War II, but in 1966, new excavations got a few original
bones again.
350,000 years ago
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo
First Homo Neanderthalensis genus that is found in Europe and parts of western
and central Asia. Neanderthals are either classified as a
subspecies of humans (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) or
as a separate species (Homo neanderthalensis).The first
proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as
600,000–350,000 years ago. By 130,000 years ago,
complete Neanderthal characteristics had appeared. These
characteristics then disappeared in Asia by 50,000 years
ago and in Europe by 30,000 years ago; however,
evidence of fire by Neanderthals at Gibraltar indicate that
they may have survived there until 24,000 years ago.
First Homo sapiens
Modern humans (Homo sapiens—Latin: “wise man”)
34
250,000 years ago
stone spears & knives
originated in east Africa, are large brained, omnivorous
無所不吃的, tool (stone spears, stone knives) using,
speaking hominids, who live in bands like other
primates 靈長類動物.
195,000 years ago
Oldest Human Bone
The oldest human bone dated 195,000 years ago was
discovered in Ethiopia.
Eventually, humans started to use their minds to
control their prey instead of chasing them around.
They domesticated herd animals. This adaptation
probably appeared first in barren regions, where
protecting the cooperative herd animals and helping
them find food is easier than hunting them in such a
place. Humans have domesticated many animals from
the initial dogs, goats and sheep to cattle, horses,
camels and poultry to elephants, llamas 無峰駝, pigs
and cats.
Because of the changing weather of the Ice Age cycles,
desertification began in Africa and Asia, and humans
were pushed to the always plentiful river valleys. They
were already experimenting with domesticating
grasses like wheat and barley, when they started to
grow the grass in cooperative farms on the bountiful
river plains. Grass is condensed bio-energy and the
ability to utilize this energy imparts great power. Cattle
need four stomachs to digest the tough grasses, but
humans learned how to harness the seeds, and there
was enough food to support a large urban population
and civilization was born.
105,000 years ago
Out of Africa
Taking advantage of one of the periodical eras of warm,
wet climate that turned the deserts of northern Africa
into a relatively green and pleasant landscape, a small
band of Homo sapiens migrated through Egypt and out
of Africa via the Sinai Peninsula to the Middle East.
There they apparently met and coexisted with humans
35
of a different and older species Neanderthals (Homo
neandertalensis).
100,000 years ago
Human Bone in Israel
100,000 years ago
Oldest human bone dated 100,000 years old was
discovered in Israel, the oldest human bone outside of
Africa.
Simple dugouts 獨木舟, canoes made by hollowing
simple boats
large tree trunks, or rafts with logs tied together by
reeds were used to cross the sea from China to Japan.
(?)
90,000 years ago
Humans in India
Homo sapiens were in India and (ocean levels were
generally much lowered at the time, the distance
between East Africa and Arabia (Yemen) at the
southern tip of Red Sea was only 11 km wide (same
situation should also happen at the Strait of Hormuz
between Oman at the Western tip of Arabia and Iran)
because a vast amount of water was locked up in the
glaciers of the Ice Age). This migration of Homo
sapiens were taking the route from East of Africa to
Arabia, then to Iran, going south along the coast and
reached India, and later to Southeast Asia (much of
Southeast Asia was dry land, part of an exposed
continental shelf).
78,000 years ago
Spear head in India
70,000-68,000 years ago
Tools in Malaysia
A spear head dated 78,000 years old was found in
West India.
Tools dated 70,000-68,000 years old were found in
Malaysia .
Last Glacial Period
Ice sheets extended to about 45 degrees north latitude.
70,000 to 10,000 years ago
These sheets were 3 to 4 km thick.
65,000-40,000 years ago
Humans crossed miles of open ocean (probably on
in New Guinea and Australia
rafts) to reach New Guinea and Australia. A human
skull dated 60,000 years old was found in Australia.
50,000 years ago
in China
Humans migrated from the Middle East across the
plains of Central Asia to China and northeastern Asia,
36
Homo erectus extinct
eventually making it to the islands of Japan. As Homo
sapiens spread to East and Southeast Asia, remnant
populations of Homo erectus were displaced and
became extinct.
45,000 years ago
Humans made their way into Europe from the Middle
East via Turkey, the Black Sea, and along the Danube
River, challenging the existing populations of
Neanderthals there.
42,000 years ago
Shells used by humans were discovered in Turkey.
Shells in Turkey
40,000 years ago
“Europa”
A human skull was discovered in a cave in Romania in
2002. This skull is called “Europa.”
35,000 years ago
Artifacts in Germany
Artifacts were discovered in Germany, showing humans
were more socialized and organized than the
Neanderthals, who were pushed to the edge of Europe
in Gibraltar, and eventually vanished.
40,000-12,000 years ago
The Paleolithic (“Old Stone Age”) period. Efficient
Paleolithic Period
(Old Stone Age)
means were devised to hunt down large animals, and
means to process hides and the creation of cut and sewn
hide and fur garments to deal with the cold glacial
environment. The use of fire for heating, cooking, and
light, and the creation of shelters. Spear-throwers, awls,
needles and hammers made from stones and bones were
used.
40,000 years ago
Bone needles dated 40,000 years old were found in
Stone Needle
Siberia. They were used to sew up reindeer skin for
clothes so humans could bear the cold there.
30,000 years ago
Neanderthals extinct
Clay and Ceramics
Neanderthals became extinct.
Clays were heated to high temperatures and were
hardened into ceramics, made into small statues of
animals in Moravia (Czech Republic).
37
25,000 years ago
Another tribe of humans arrived Europe from the East.
Bricks
Bricks made by firing and hardening clays.
20,000 years ago
Reached North America
Humans moved to the northeasternmost Eurasia, and
from there crossed a broad plain of open land
connecting Eurasia (Siberia) with North America
(Alaska)—the land bridge where the Bering Strait now
separates the two continents.
17,000 years ago
Signs dated 17,000 years old found on the coast of
in Vancouver
14,400 years ago
Vancouver.
Artifacts dated 14,400 years old found in Texas.
in Texas
13,000 years ago
in California, Brazil
Caves with signs dated 13,000 years old were found
in Brazil; human bones found in California.
Over 10,000 years ago
Most humans lived as hunter-gatherers. They generally
lived in small nomadic groups known as band
societies.
13,500 years ago
Sea trade
Sea trade took place between China and the islands,
just before the end of the last Ice Age, but not in a
mass scale yet.
12,000 years ago
A strong global warming period in the Earth’s climate
The end of the last Ice Age began to melt the huge glaciers that had covered much
of northern Eurasia and North America.
Artifacts, the First Temple
Turkey
New Food Sources
Population Growth
Artifacts and remnants of the first temple dated
12,000 years ago were discovered on a hillside in
Turkey, showing the hunter-gatherers started to settle
down and built a temple.
The retreat of glaciers and permafrost 永久凍土層 to far north
latitudes created vast steppes 乾草原 and prairies 大草原 that
were ideal habitat for huge herds of horses, bison and other
food animals. Further south, warmer, wetter conditions
encouraged the growth of food plants and animals such as
38
antelope and wild goats. With these new food sources,
human numbers and population density began to climb.
Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic period is a revolution in human
(New Stone Age)
development. This brought with it settled agriculture and
11,500-5,500 years ago domesticated animals, and in later millennia the great
civilizations of Asia, the Middle East and South America,
with highly developed urban areas and large irrigation
systems.
Domestication of Grasses and Plants
The technology that allowed technological
advance in human history was the domestication of
grasses and plants, including wheat and legumes in
Mesopotamia and northwestern India; millet in North
China, rice in South China and Southeast Asia; corn
and beans in Mesoamerica.
Domestication of Animals
Neolithic hunters began directing and managing herds
of horses and wild cattle, and turned wolves, swine
and fowl into dogs, pigs and chickens.
Settlements, Villages
What used to be camps for hunters, because of the
need to take care of the domesticated plants and
animals, turned to villages or season-long
settlements.
Pottery
A more sedentary life reduced the hunter-gatherer
nomad’s requirement that possessions be light and
portable. Pottery was perhaps the most significant
consequence of this change—too heavy to carry on
nomadic migrations, it greatly improved the
possibilities for storing and cooking food in a
proto-village environment. Pots over 10,000 years
old were discovered in Guilin, Guangxi, China.
10,500 years ago
Bow and arrow—earliest evidence preserved.
Bow and arrow
10, 000 years ago
Copper made into tools.
Copper tools
39
Agriculture
(11:59:20 pm of December 31, in the Cosmic Calendar)
Present-day climate
10,000 years
(400 generations) ago
9,000 years ago
Settlement from China to
Indo-Pacific archipelagos
The climate in which we live today began about 10,000
years ago, at the end of the last ice age. This relative
climatic and environmental stability provided the
framework for the development of human civilization.
Ancestors of the Austronesian-speaking peoples settling
out from the Fujian coast of China to Taiwan, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia,
Polynesia, etc.—the Indo-Pacific archipelagos 群島.
9,000 years ago, humans settled on all main land masses of Earth except for
icebound Antarctica.
Originally, all Homo sapiens came from the eastern part of Africa. From
105,000-9,000 years, a small band of Homo sapiens started to migrate out of
Africa, gradually settled on different and all the main land masses of the Earth.
Due to:
1) the adaptation of humans to specific habitats (hot, cold, sunny,
light-deprived…), and
2) widely separated populations with their own genetic isolation from one
another, eventually, the superficial traits of skin color, hair color and texture,
eyelid shape, cheekbone shape, and others become the external defining
characteristics of different human “races.” For example, originally dark-skin
Europeans were evolved to the present light-skin race because less sunlight in the
last ice age in Europe forced humans to evolutionalize to lighter skin there in
order to be able to absorb more vitamin D (Alice Roberts’ theory).
8,000 years ago
Full-scale Neolithic (“New Stone”) culture in the
Full-scale Neolithic (“New Stone”) Culture
Middle East and in many parts of the
world over the course of time.
Canals for irrigation
Canals for irrigation were built in the Middle East.
6,000 years ago
The first proto-states developed in Mesopotamia, and
in the Sahara/Nile and the Indus Valleys. Military
forces were formed for protection, and government
bureaucracies for administration. States cooperated
40
and competed for resources, in some cases waging
wars.
6,000 years ago
First wheels
The first wheels were potter’s wheels used to rotate
the clay as it was made into a symmetrical vessel.
Soon after, wheels were introduced to replace runners
on sledges in Mesopotamia, creating first carts.
6,000-4,000 years ago
In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia sundials were used
Sundials and Water Clocks
to measure the time of day by the position of a
shadow, while water clocks (clepsydra), measured
the passage of time by the level of water flowing
from a vessel.
5,500-5,000 years ago
Copper was used extensively for weapons and tools.
Copper Age
5,000 years ago
Writing, Papyrus
Writing began somewhat before 5,000 years ago.
While people in Mesopotamia pressed cuneiform 楔形
文字 symbols into clay tables, Egyptians painted
hieroglyphs 象形文字 on material made by pounding
stems of a reed, called papyrus 紙莎草紙.
5,000 years ago
Dawn of Civilization
The river valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, the
Indus, and the Yellow rivers were the birth places of
first human civilizations, but others have sprung up
all over the world. The development of agriculture
caused the first paradigm shift as the primitive
prehistoric Neolithic culture in these areas gave way
to primitive civilizations. This shift separated humans
from nature and sent us on a new path. The transition
seems to have involved in every case a combination
of two things:
1) a culture founded on settled agricultural
communities; and
2) the development of urban centers with literate
religious and social hierarchies whose members
asserted control over such maters as irrigation and
41
water control, ritual and religious observances,
the application of military power or legitimized
violence, as well as the right to appropriate for
their own use a portion of the goods produced by
ordinary farmers and workers.
Early Agricultural Communities
In prehistoric Neolithic period, many parts of the
world began switching into agricultural
communities, including
1) Mesopotamia (the land between Tigris and
Euphrates);
2) Valleys on Yellow River, Yangtze River in
China;
3) Parts of India, including the Indus Valley;
4) Southeast Asia;
5) The Nile valley in Egypt;
6) The great bend of the Niger River in western
Africa;
7) The Danube Valley in Europe;
8) Parts of Central America and Mexico;
9) The Mississippi Valley and North America;
10) The Amazon Basin in South America;
11) The highlands of New Guinea (north of
Australia); and
12) The islands of the Pacific Ocean.
Early Urban Centers
In prehistoric Neolithic period, some agricultural
communities, but not all, evolved into urban centers. In
terms of time sequence, they appeared as follows:
5,500 years ago
1) Mesopotamia;
5,100 years ago
4,500 years ago
4,000 years ago
2) the Nile Valley in Egypt;
3) the Indus Valley in India;
4) the Yellow River Valley in China.
The Society paradigm changed due to the energy
derived from the population explosion, which was
brought about by agriculture. Knowledge changed
due to the time some humans now had for
42
contemplation instead of food production, such as
engineering and tool improvement. Different social
systems were developed by different civilized
cultures to accommodate their new found wealth, but
each civilization evolved along the lines already in
place during that particular cultures infancy.
Mesopotamian Civilizations
The 600-mile-long plain of the Tigris and Euphrates
Valleys stretching from Anatolia to the Persian Gulf
is the site of the earliest know civilization, which
5,500-4,000 years ago
takes its name from the city-state Sumer. The first of
Sumerian Civilization
a succession of Mesopotamian civilizations,
Sumerian culture first blossomed about 5,500-5,000
years ago. Each of the cities within the Sumerian
culture area was a sacred temple city, the realm of a
god whose regent on earth was the priest-king.
Sumerian culture gave rise to a number of important
Calendar
Cuneiform 楔形文字 Writing
innovations, including a calendar, the
invention of writing (cuneiform 楔形文字, written
Plow
Potter’s Wheel
with a stylus on tablets of soft clay), the plow, the
potter’s wheel, and wheeled carts. The development
Wheeled Cart
of writing, in particular, was an important element in
the commercial and administrative success of the
Sumerian city-states.
Separate and frequently warring city-states such as
Lagash, Nippur, and Ur came under the control of
the more northerly Empire of Akkad, whose greatest
king was Sargon (ca. 2,250 B.C.) The Akkadian
Empire in turn fell under the sway of the Babylonian
Empire, whose king Hammurabi (ca. 1,750 B.C.)
conquered all of Mesopotamia and is credited with
Code of Laws
the first known Code of Laws. Shortly before 1,500
B.C. this empire fell under the domination of the
Kassites, northern invaders who relied on a new
Horse-drawn Chariot
military shock weapon, the horse-drawn chariot. The
Sumerians disappeared from history about 4,000
years ago as a result of military domination by
various Semitic peoples.
43
5,100-2,500 years ago
Egyptian Civilization
The great valley of the Nile, which creates a slender
green oasis through the Sahara, had given birth by
about 5,000 years ago to a network of farming
villages whose population was of urban density,
though not yet to cities as such. Tradition, which
may incorporate elements of legend, credits the
founding of the Egyptian monarchy to Menes (fl.
3,100 B.C.), whose conquest of Lower (ie, northern)
5,000- 4,200 years ago
Old Kingdom
Egypt laid the foundation for the Old Kingdom (ca.
3,000-2,200B.C.). Political unification, quite
different from the autonomous city-states of Sumer,
permitted a rapid assimilation of some aspects of
Sumerian culture and technology into the indigenous
culture of the Nile Valley, while the desert meant
relative freedom from invasion. The pharaohs did not
rule on behalf of the gods, but were divine beings
themselves; the building of their colossal tombs, the
pyramids, were great religious works directed by the
4,500 years ago
unitary state. The most famous is the Great Pyramid
Pyramid of Cheops at Gizeh
of Cheops at Gizeh (ca. 2,500 B.C.). The
development of the hieroglyphic 象形文字 writing in
Hieroglyphic 象形文字 Writing
Egypt, not much later than the invention of
cuneiform writing in Sumer, facilitated both the
administrative and the religious roles of the Egyptian
monarchy.
The older diversity of the valley reappeared during a
century of dissolution and division called the First
Intermediate Period, after which the traditions of
4,100- 3,800 years ago
Menes were revived in the Middle Kingdom (ca.
Middle Kingdom
2,100-1,800 B.C.). Architecture and sculpture were
consciously restorationist, modeled after the Old
Kingdom. This period was also the “classical age” of
Egyptian literature. But this age ended with the
invasion from Syria-Palestine of a warlike
charioteering people known as Hyksos, who ruled
during the Second Intermediate Period (ca.
1,800-1,600 B.C.). The Eighteenth Dynasty, with its
44
capital at Thebes, at last managed to drive out the
Hyksos and reestablish royal authority throughout
3,600-3,100 years ago
New Kingdom
the valley, initiating the New Kingdom (ca.
1,600-1,100 B.C.)
Almost immediately after the Hyksos conquerors
had been expelled from Egypt proper, the pharaohs
of the New Kingdom (1,570-1,065 B.C.)
reconsolidated the monarchy and began an expansion
of the empire into Syria. Thutmose I (d. 1,495 B.C.)
sent an invading army as far as the Euphrates River.
His successor Thutmose II (r. ca. 1,495-1,490 B.C.)
did not sustain his father’s conquests, and lost power
to his half-sister, queen and regent Hatshepsut (d. ca.
1,468 B.C.), who maintained her control over the
throne during the first twenty years of the reign of
Thutmose III (ca. 1,500-1,436 B.C.). After the death
of Hatshepsut in 1468 B.C., Thutmose III again sent
armies to the east, winning a great battle at Megiddo
in Palestine. The result was an Egyptian empire in
Palestine and Syria in which local princes ruled their
peoples while Egyptian bureaucrats and garrison
commanders oversaw imperial interests, especially
the tribute payments. Egyptian control southward
along the Nile into the Sudan and Nubia was also
reestablished.
The radical religious reforms of Pharaoh Amenhotep
IV (r. ca. 1,372-1,354 B.C.) brought about a period
of severe political disruption. The pharaoh changed
his name to Akhenaton and led a movement after
1,370 B.C. to obliterate the name and memory of all
the Egyptian gods save for the sun-god Aton (and his
incarnation on Earth, the pharaoh). This
almost-monotheistic revolution absorbed the
attention of the monarchy to such an extent that it
helped the empire to crumble and the dynasty to be
overthrown. A rigid traditionalism accompanied the
painful recovery of the empire. Akhenaton’s
son-in-law, Tutankhamen (r. 1,361-52 B.C.),
45
sponsored a return to older religious norms,
including the return of the god Amon and the eclipse
of Aton. Tutankhamen (whose famous tomb was
discovered in 1922) was also known as a lawgiver,
and as the sponsor of new monumental buildings in
the capital at Thebes. But by 1,200 B.C. a series of
invasions, by Hittites and others, forced the
Egyptians to abandon their empire in Palestine and
Syria to defend the Nile Valley.
The Third Intermediate Period (1,065-525 B.C.) saw
Egypt’s survival in a cultural and religious sense,
with the priesthood exerting control over a series of
ineffective monarchs. But the state, weakened by
invasions of Libyans from the western desert and
Nubians from the Upper Nile, finally fell victim to
conquests by the Assyrians (671 B.C.) and the
Persians (525 B.C.
Indian Civilization
4,500-3,500 years ago
The Indus Basin, stretching from the Himalayas to
the Arabian Sea, had become by about 5,000 years
ago another locus of settled agriculture. The
emerging Indus culture showed obvious signs of
Sumerian influence. The great cities of Harappa and
Mohenjo-Daro have been excavated, along with
many small villages. Small statuary and cylinder
seals demonstrate a rich religious, artistic, and
commercial life. Some evidence of writing has been
discovered, but it remains undeciphered. This Indian
civilization flourished from about 4,500 to about
3,500 years ago when it was conquered by Central
Asian (“Aryan”) tribesmen who used chariots and
arrows.
Chinese Civilization
4,000 years ago on
Around 4,000 years ago, the millet-based agricultural
villages of the North China Plain gave rise to the
semi-legendary Xia Dynasty, which ushered in the
4,000-3,550 years ago
Xia Dynasty
Bronze Age in East Asia. The Xia were overthrown
around 3,550 years ago by Tang the Victorious, who
46
Bronze vessels
established the Shang Dynasty, which endured for
500 years. The Shang Dynasty is noted for its
3,550-3,050 years ago
Shang Dynasty
Bones-inscribed Writing
Chariot
Wheat
Sheepraising
sophisticated bronze vessels, used in worship of the
royal ancestors, and for oracle bones inscribed with
an early form of Chinese script asking questions of
the gods. Shang culture was enriched after around
3,350 years ago by new technologies from western
Eurasia, including the chariot, the cultivation of
wheat, and sheepraising. Roughly contemporary with
the Shang state was the separate Bronze Age culture
of the Ba people, characterized by large, highly
stylized bronze human statues and masks, with sites
in the Sichuan Basin near the present city of
Chengdu.
There were four initial civilizations, Sumer, Egypt,
India, and China, and later Iran, Greece, Basque,
Mexico, Canaan, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Inca, Kogi,
Khmer, the Mississippi region, and Polynesia.
5,000-3,500 years ago
A better metal than copper—the alloy bronze, usually
Bronze Age
copper alloyed with tin—is stronger and harder,
replaced copper as the main metal for weapons and
tools.
5,000 years ago
Cotton and silk fibers
Cotton and silk fibers were introduced and spun
together to make yarn.
Pyramids
(11:59:53 pm of a day of the universe timeline)
3,500 years ago
3,500-150 years ago
Iron Age
The Bronze Age ended after people in Anatolia
discovered how to smelt and work iron, which is even
harder and stronger than bronze. Early iron had too
high a melting point to be cast, so it was hammered
into shape (“wrought”). The Chinese, about 2,300
years ago, discovered that mixing charcoal with iron
47
reduces the melting point enough so that it can be
cast. About 1,900 years ago, cast iron was
rediscovered in Greece, but cast iron did not begin to
replace wrought iron in the West until the 12th
century (900 years ago).
Three great Endeavors
2,500 years ago
Three primitive civilizations, China, India, and
Greece, experienced the next paradigm shift at roughly
the same time. Humans have always been rational
and logical, but until the advent of the Philosophy
greater paradigm, they had never applied it to
themselves. Inexplicably, reason and logic bloomed
around 500 B.C. Independent of each other, humans
in China, India, and Greece started to examine the
reality of the primitive civilizations and found them
lacking any rationality. Confucius, Buddha, and the
Greek Philosophers each used the reason and logic
for different goals, but they all came up with the
Doctrine of the Mean, or healthy behavior through
moderation. There are other similarities, but none as
vociferous.
Human history follows a path of competition and
warfare. It seems to be dominated by the latest
killing technique. First came bronze weapons, then
came the chariot, iron and steel weapons, the
phalanx, ships, cavalry, guns, the citizen soldiers,
airplanes, and most recently, the nuclear bomb.
Humans can be a barbaric species with a great
potential for violence.
2,250 years ago
Parchment 羊皮紙
Paper
Parchment, a treated animal skin invented in
Turkey, gradually replaced papyrus 紙莎草紙 for
writing in the Roman Empire. Meanwhile in China,
paper, a material similar to papyrus, was prepared
from pounded cloth fibers. At first paper was used
for cleaning or as a packing material. By 100 A.D
48
(1,900 years ago), paper was used for writing in
China.
2,100 years ago
Tall Buildings of 5 stories
The first buildings had only one floor, but by Roman
times apartment houses five stories tall were built.
Confucius
In China, Confucius used reason and logic to help
repair the unraveling culture in China, which was
starting to sink into the period of Warring States, one
of the worst eras in human history. In his time,
China’s culture was only beginning to fray.
Deliberately, Confucius created a new culture out of
China’s mythical past put together with the new logic
and reason. The new reality was based on the noble
goal of educating an entire culture of gentlemen
scholars and to build a society which rewards them.
The Chinese used Confucianism to rebuild their
civilization after 200 years of warfare. Later, the
Confucian high culture would even convert the
occupying Mongols. It still survives in China and
some of its satellite states.
Buddha
Siddharta Gautama was a prince who left a life of
luxury to search for the Truth. First, he became an
ascetic and later tried Raja Yoga, but they did not
work for him. He finally reasoned through the mythic
gnosis of the Upanishads and attained Nirvana on his
own. When asked if he was a god, he humbly stated
that he was simply awake. Buddha (or the Awakened
One) came up with his own path of philosophical
gnosis called the Eightfold Path and went about India
telling everyone of his findings. Buddhist
missionaries soon spread throughout the Eastern
Hemisphere, but found success only in East Asia.
In India, the Buddhists were disrupting the accepted
reality and this was not taken lightly by the warlords
and priests who ruled through the caste system. After
49
a long struggle, Buddhism was finally pushed out of
India by the introduction of the Krishna and Rama
myths which supported the traditional Indian memes,
thus India has remained in the primitive civilization
stage. Buddhism became one of India’s greatest
exports though as it has survived in many forms in
many cultures, from the Zen of Japan, to the
mountains of Tibet, and in the mystical movements
within the Western religions.
The Greek Philosophers
In Greece, an entire sub-culture evolved around the
love of wisdom (or Philosophy). The most prominent
members were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They
reasoned through reason and formed the core of
Classical Philosophy, the greater meme which has
dominated Philosophy in the West ever since. They
questioned reality and then questioned the
questioning. Their logic and reason became an
academic discipline, which soon branched out into art,
politics, mathematics, geometry, and much later, into
Science. With a new found optimism, the Greeks
flirted with democracy, expanded markets, wrestled
with religion, and boldly attempted to conquer the
world under Alexander, bringing their new rationality
with them.
Mythical Religions
The myths of religion are non-rational and
non-logical living narratives that began around 3,500
to 2,000 years ago. Each myth puts that particular
tribe in the best lands, at the center of the world, and
important to the story of creation.
Christianity
Yeshuah bar Yosif (or Jesus) was a poor carpenter’s
son in the Judea of Roman occupation. Judaism was
in a renaissance of its own with the rebuilding of the
main temple in Jerusalem. Yeshuah was deeply
spiritual and quite intelligent. He may have had some
Qabbalic training, plus he knew a great deal about
50
Judaism and Zoroastrianism, which was thriving over
in Persia, the rival of Rome. While meditating in the
desert with the Essenes (a hermit sect of Judaism), he
synthesized Judaism and Zoroastrianism. This
synthesis was carried on by others like Paul of Tarsus,
who formed the core of Orthodox Christianity.
Finally, here was what the Greeks had been looking
for. Christianity is the synthesis of both monotheisms
in question, Judaism and Zoroastrianism, without any
political baggage from Persia and without the familial
and cultural requirements of Judaism which, like
Hinduism, demands that one be born into the religion
to qualify as a member. The Greeks converted to the
evangelical Christianity. Later, the entire Roman
Empire was forced to convert, as the logical, rational,
and revealed monotheism of Christianity would
become a theological triumph as other, less
sophisticated religions were swept aside with the aid
of a military dictatorship. The influence of
Zoroastrian and Judaic ideas through Christianity
(and later Islam) are felt throughout the Western
cultures.
Islam
In Arabia, a caravan master, Muhammad ibn
Abdullah, was having difficulty with the dilemma of
having too many living narratives to choose from.
Arabia was positioned between the Christian
Byzantine Empire and the Zoroastrian Persian
Empire. There was also a large Jewish population, as
well as the indigenous pagan Arabs. Traveling
extensively, Muhammad was confronted with all of
these competing paradigms. In a cave in the desert,
the dilemma was synthesized into Islam.
The warrior Arab tribes soon converted to Islam, and
then set out to conquer the world in a holy war. They
devastated the Byzantine Empire, destroyed the
51
Persian Empire wiping out Zoroastrianism as a world
religion, and conquered everything from North Africa
to Central Asia. After the bloodshed, the Islamic
Empire was one of the high points in human history.
Islam is a separate culture, but it shares the same
Semite creation myths as the other Western cultures.
The Islamic Empire was the only other culture to join
Confucian China and Hellenized Europe to the
civilized society level, thanks to Philosophy.
600
The Chinese began using ink to transfer images
printing
carved in a wood block to paper or other materials.
850
Gunpowder
The first mention of gunpowder, an explosive mixture
of saltpeter 硝酸鉀, charcoal and sulfur, is in a Chinese
book published about 850 A.D.
1150
Rockets
The Chinese observed that explosions of gunpowder in
a container could propel the container some distance.
By 1150 A.D., they had controlled the explosion
enough to propel a container with a sustained burning.
The first rockets were used for fireworks but soon also
employed in warfare.
1468?
Printing was introduced in the 15th century.
Printing
Modern Society
around 1500
Empirical Science surfaced in every other culture
before it was used by the Europeans around 1500.
Starting in India under Asoka, a Buddhist, it then
moved east to China and west to the Islamic
Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and finally to
Western Europe. Wherever the idea of experiment
went, it was pursued at first and then persecuted
when it started to question the accepted knowledge
or, worse, religion. The Protestant Europeans were
questioning both when Science came to them.
Finally, Science had a place to grow.
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The modern European nation-states, who used science
and technology to conquer the world, bringing it
together for the first time. Since the Europeans did
not utterly destroy the cultures they were conquering,
which was new, all of the various cultures, which
were at their own stage of development, were brought
together into a global empire.
Colonialism
15th century to early 19th century
Modernity spread throughout the competing
European nation-states. With the knowledge they
gained from science and the accompanying
technological advances, they were able to conquer the
whole world. Spain, Portugal, France, England, Holland,
Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Russia all lay claim to the
world. Such was their might that they only had to fight
token wars before it was realized by the indigenous
people that resistance was futile. This quick surrender
saved the people as well as the natural resources which
would soon be exploited. There is not one border in the
world which was not created by a European state.
Capitalism
Since 16th century
For the merchants, democratic republics are easier to
control than any other form of government. First, the
republic takes away the threat of the warlords, who can
ruin a nation with useless wars and who are able to impose
their will through force. Second, it gives the populace the
illusion that they have choices, which makes them less
likely to rebel. Third, the representatives are usually from
the merchant class, which means they are conveniently
able to draft and enforce their own laws. Fourth, these
representatives also seem to be easily bought, which gives
those with great wealth an avenue to exert their will by
influencing several of them at any given time.
All religions have been easily pushed aside by granting the
freedom of religion to the individual and the freedom from
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religion to the nation by separating it from governance.
These freedoms evolved out of the long and painful religious
wars caused by the Protestant revolt from the Catholic
Church. The solution in the American Constitution, and later
almost all nation-states, was to let the individual decide
which religion to live. The irony is that the merchants were
able to suppress Western religions with the individualism
originated by Western religions.
1783
Both hot air and hydrogen balloons were introduced in 1783.
Hot air Balloon
Industrial Revolution
When the colonizing was complete, the European
late 18th and early 19th century
nation-states became the wealthiest nations
ever, which caused an increase in the funding of science
and technology, creating a self-perpetuating spiral of
technological advancement and wealth accumulation.
This is known as the Industrial Revolution, which made
those merchants involved the wealthiest individuals
ever. The merchants were now powerful enough to
challenge the warlords and the priests for control of the
economy and the society. Eventually, they would seize
control of Politics by replacing the king with the
democratic republic and gain control of the living
narrative by replacing organized religion with the idea
of religious freedom.
1783
Boats and ships propelled by steam began in France.
Steam boats
1825
Aluminum
1828?
Aluminum, known since 1825, gradually became the
second most common metal in use (after steel) after an
electrochemical extraction discovered in 1888
dramatically lowered production cost.
Fossil fuel revolution: coal, trains.
Coal, Trains
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1843
Ships with steel hulls began in England.
Ships with steel hull
1856
Steel
1877
Sound Recording
Steel, the very strong, hard alloy of iron and carbon, was
made in small amounts for most of iron’s history.
Inexpensive processes for making large quantities of
steel were discovered only in the 19th century, the best
known being the Bessemer process of 1856. Steel
gradually replaced iron as the main metal for structural
uses.
Thomas Edison recorded and played back his voice
with a device that used a needle attached to a
diaphragm to make a groove in waxed paper.
Socialism
Once the merchants had taken economic control of the
Since late-19th century Society, much of the populace went from farmers to
factory workers. Life was miserable and short for these
workers, who were beginning to rebel. Socialism evolved as
a way for the workers to take control of industry and gain the
benefits of their own labor. There were many rebellions and
revolutions. The Russian Empire became the Soviet Union as
the Communists actually overthrew their government and set
up a nation-state based solely on Economics. For the most
part, the workers settled for labor unions and slowly menial
labor was exported to the colonies.
1876
Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell patented telephone, which used
a metal membrane that vibrated in response to
changes in electromagnetic force.
1884
Television
German inventor Paul Nipkow created a method based on
a rotating disk that broke images into varying electrical
pulses that could be reconstructed using a second disk.
Several inventors used versions of the Nipkow disk for
early television.
1888
Heinrich Hertz showed that invisible electromagnetic
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Radio
waves could be produced and detected at a distance.
Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi extended the
distance and used the waves, which he named radio
waves, to transmit Morse code.
1903
Flight
The Wright Brothers (Wilbur and Orville) achieved
powered flight in 1903.
1948?
Invention of the computer.
Computer
1992 the Pope pardoned Galileo The Catholic Church had persecuted and
threatened him with death in the 1600s if he didn’t
apologize and stop saying that the earth was round and
revolved around the sun instead of vice versa.
50,000 years from now
The period of warm climates caused by the rapid
Possible end of the Anthropocene Epoch 人類世時代 burning of fossil fuels.
1.1 billion years from now
The Sun becomes 10% brighter than today. The
Earth's atmosphere dries out
Earth's atmosphere dries out.
3 billion years from now
Galaxies collide
The Andromeda Galaxy collides with our galaxy. Many
solar systems are destroyed.
3.5 billion years from now
Earth’s Oceans evaporate
The Sun becomes 40% brighter than today. If the Earth
is still orbiting the sun, its oceans evaporate.
5.4 billion years from now
End of the Sun (Red Giant)
The Sun will become a Red Giant in about 5.4 billion
years. By then, the hydrogen fuel in the core of the
Sun is used up fusing into helium (the hydrogen atoms
to combine to form helium). The core shrinks and
becomes hotter, allowing new fusion reactions with
helium fusing into carbon. The rate of new nuclear
fusion (production of heavy atomic nuclei from lighter
atomic nuclei) increases, and the new fusion is hotter
than the fusion of hydrogen to helium. This added
energy causes the hydrogen and helium outside the core
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to expand. The Sun becomes red because the outer
layers are relatively cool. The Sun will become 1.6
times bigger and 2.2 times brighter than today, and will
expand almost to the orbit of Earth.
End of the Earth
When the Sun becomes a Red Giant in about 5 billion
years, the Sun will expand almost to the orbit of Earth,
completely engulfing Mercury and Venus, and charring
Earth to a cinder. The solar system will eventually die
when the Sun explodes and sprays gases and rock,
which will become another nebula cloud. That nebula
could eventually reform into another solar system.
6.5 billion years from now
The Sun – a Big Red Giant
The Sun becomes a full-fledged red giant, 170 times
bigger and 2400 times brighter than today.
6.7 billion years from now The Sun starts fusing helium and shrinks back down to
The Sun
10 times bigger and 40 times brighter than today.
6.8 billion years from now The Sun runs out of helium and, too small to start fusing
The Sun
carbon and oxygen, enters a second red phase. It is 180
times bigger and 3000 times brighter than today.
6.9 billion years from now The Sun begins to pulsate every 100,000 years, ejecting
The Sun – White Dwarf
more and more mass in each pulse, and finally throwing
off all but the hot inner core, becoming a white dwarf.
What could end life and devastate environment on Earth
1. Abrupt change of the sun’s energy output, either more
or less;
2. In about 5 more billion years, it’s inevitable that the
depletion of hydrogen at the core of the sun will make
the sun much bigger and hotter and all life on Earth will
extinguish;
3. Major volcano eruptions on Earth;
4. Any big asteroids hitting the Earth. In fact, several
devastating waves of extinctions on Earth obliterated
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many life-forms and markedly changed the course of
evolution had already happened on Earth;
5. Regular change of orbit to the Sun (ice-ages);
6. Nearby exploding stars;
7. passage through a dense nebula;
End of the Universe
Several possibilities:
1. An Open Universe—in the late 1960s, some
astronomers proposed that the universe will expand
forever, therefore there will be no end of our
universe;
2. A Closed Universe—also in the late 1960s, some
proposed that our universe is a closed universe, one
that the expansion will eventually be halted by the
universe’s overall mass (gravitational pull), and a
collapse will ensue, culminating in the Big Crunch;
3. A Flat Universe—in the 1980s, some proposed a flat
universe in which the outrush will slow to an
equilibrium, with the final destiny being neither
endless expansion nor collapse, thereby no end for
this kind of universe also;
4. An Oscillating Universe--Finally, the galactic matter
may just go cold and dark, but flying through the
void a scattered black death would not be efficient.
Supposedly, all galactic matter will eventually be
sucked into the massive black holes which exist at
the center of each galaxy. A black hole is formed
when a star is so large that its gravity and density
make the matter collapse into itself and go at a right
angle out of our dimension. It then starts to suck
everything into it, even light. These galactic black
holes will eventually collect all of the pure energy.
They will then start to gravitate towards one another,
collide, explode, and start the whole process over
again in an ever-oscillating universe. Of course, this
may be only one of a myriad of universes which
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burst into the infinite void like fireworks in the night
sky;
5. In 1956, Isaac Asimov in his short story “The Last
Question” says in the remote future, long after the
last star has ceased to shine, all intelligence in the
universe have combined into one omni-intelligence
that has no physical form but pervades the very
interstices of space. Seeing the final black death of
the universe everywhere, the intelligence decides
that there is no alternative but to rework it into a
new universe—a new Big Bang.
Interstellar Travel
There is no reason we could not travel around our
galaxy or beyond. Lengthy interstellar voyages could
be achieved by retarding the biological clock that
controls the aging process, by making the ship large
enough to accommodate a microcosm of civilization,
by sending surrogates in the form of robots or by
avoiding the time factor altogether by traveling very
close to the speed of light to utilize the time dilation
effect. Fusion or matter-antimatter propulsion system
could tap virtually limitless energy sources,
permitting unbounded exploration.
Possibilities of Alien Civilization
the oceans on Earth have nurtured life-forms
for about 4 billion years, less than 1/4 of the age of
our galaxy and the universe. So, if there are advanced
life-forms elsewhere, it can be considered enough
time for them to discover us.
If aliens are not aware of us, it could be 1) they must
have self-destructed; or 2) they are not interested; or
3) we have always been alone; or 4) they are there
but have not yet discovered us; or 5) they are in a
life-form less developed than us.
Terence Dickinson of The Universe and Beyond
believes aliens are aware of us and are observing us
with interest. Passive observation and
nonintervention are the only approaches that would
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pay dividends for extraterrestrials. The odds favor the
belief that the aliens already know about us and are
silent observers. We will remain unaware of them
until they are ready to talk.
Our Efforts to Contact Alien Civilizations
1. Space ships; 2. Telescope;
3. Radio telescope since 1959. Because of an article
by Philip Morrison and Guiseppe Cocconi published
in Nature. Weakness for this is that radio sigals
directed from point A to point B in the universe would
be undetectable by our radio telescope unless we
happened to be precisely between the two points—an
enormous improbability. Our radio telescopes are far
too weak to eavesdrop on conversations not focused
in our direction.
Evolution and Advanced Aliens
Evolution beyond humanlike form is as
inevitable as out ascent from our reptilian ancestors.
One billion years ago, the highest form of life on
Earth was the worm. An alien intelligence one billion
years ahead of us on the evolutionary ladder could be
as different from us as we are from worms.
On Earth, the next stage beyond humans will
probably be computer, not biological, evolution. In
some ways, computer can be regarded as a newly
emerging form of life, one built on silicon rather than
carbon (the basis for all biological life). A silicon
computer “brain” can have unlimited size and
capacity, whereas the human brain has not increased
in size for at least 75,000 years. Continuing
miniaturization of computer components could lead
to a synthesis between humans and non-biological
computer intelligences. For example, a
microcomputer might be surgically implanted in the
human brain. One would merely think a question in a
manner that the computer could understand, and the
answer would be provided as a conscious thought.
Theoretically, there is no limit to how far this
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technology could progress. Perhaps bodies of bone
and flesh are already redundant in the universe, and
advanced civilizations have become virtually
indestructible semi-immortal arrays of silicon or its
evolutionary successor. To such a form of intelligence,
time would have a totally different meaning. With no
finite life span to impede time-consuming activities
such as interstellar travel, millions of years could be
spent in exploration. Voyages to countless star
systems would present no problems for a
semi-immortal brain. To such travelers, emerging
intelligences like ours would be fascinating biological
crucibles. Occasionally, they might look in on Earth
to glimpse the latest tribal squabble and wonder when
we will emerge to seek our place in the galactic
community. (The Universe and Beyond, p. 133)
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