What is the cosmic calendar? Thanks for asking!

OK, so you’re looking for a new calendar on which to mark family birthdays, Covid-19 dependent holiday plans and dentist appointments in 2021. Well, sorry the cosmic calendar won’t be of much use to you.

It’s totally different to the Gregorian or Islamic calendars, which measure individual days. The cosmic calendar is actually a method of scaling down the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe, to match a 365-day year. Everything is in chronological order, so one can visualise cosmic evolution, the evolution of life, the relatively short evolution of humans and the even shorter period since history began. 

In 1977 astrophysicist Carl Sagan published an essay called The Dragon of Eden, in which featured the first cosmic calendar.

OK, so how does it work?

Us humans are accustomed to measuring time in seconds, minutes and hours. Sagan’s concept helps us to have a better idea of the chronology of the universe. Each day in the cosmic calendar represents 37.8 million years of “real” time, while even a single second is equivalent to 438 years. 

The calendar visualisation starts off with the Big Bang at midnight on January 1st, with the universe expanding, cooling and gravitating since. The present day is shown at the very end of the cosmic calendar year, on December 31st.

You can follow the cosmic evolution of the universe, such as the forming of the first stars and galaxies in early January. Believe it or not, our Milky Way Galaxy only forms on May 11th, with the Sun and Earth appearing in September.

Dinosaurs show up at Christmas time, but are then extinct five days later. The first sight of “anatomically modern humans”, also known as homosapiens, is only five minutes before the end of the year. Meanwhile recorded history, based on written records, only covers the final 10 seconds.

Well consider my mind blown! All those years of human history are just a flicker of time really... In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions!

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A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance.

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