Naturalistic Paganism
Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar maps the entire history of our cosmos onto a single year (links to our Wheel of the Year Sabbats are here, and a broader calendar here). As you can imagine, things speed up considerably as the year advances. After the Big Bang on January 1, we have to wait until May for the Milky Way to form and September for our own Sun to form. But things got really busy in December:
Dec 5 First multicellular life 1 bya
Dec 14 Our First Animal Ancestors 0.67 bya
Dec 14 Arthropods emerge 0.55 bya
Dec 18 Our First Ancestors with Backbones (Fish) 0.5 bya
Dec 20 Land plants emerge 0.45 bya
Dec 21 Insects and seeds emerge 0.4 bya
Dec 22 Our Ancestors crawl onto land 0.36 bya
Dec 23 Reptiles and dinosaurs emerge 0.3 bya
Dec 26 Ancestors with Hair (Mammals) 0.2 bya
Dec 27 Birds emerge 0.15 bya
Dec 28 Flowers emerge 0.13 bya
Dec 30 Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event (non-avian dinosaurs die out) 65 mya
Dec 30 Ancestors with hands (Primates) 65 mya
Dec 31 Upright Ancestors with bigger brains (Hominids) 15 mya
When December 31st arrives, we have an especially fun way to count down to the New Year with Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. Jon Cleland Host shares the experience with his children, calling out momentous events by the tick of a watch, as history whizzes by in the last few seconds before midnight. Try it out! (Skip some as you like). This is so much more fun than just sitting around waiting for the ball to start moving, and much more meaningful than yet another singer on stage amid fireworks! Because these go so fast in the last few seconds, it works better to try out a practice run sometime during the day by yourself just to see how it works.
Human evolution
| Date / time | mya | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Dec, 06:05 | 15 | Apes |
| 31 Dec, 14:24 | 6 | hominids |
| 31 Dec, 22:24 | 2.5 | primitive humans and stone tools |
| 31 Dec, 23:20 | 1.0 | Domestication(1) of fire by Homo erectus |
| 31 Dec, 23:52 | 0.2 | Anatomically modern humans |
| 31 Dec, 23:55 | 0.11 | Beginning of most recent glacial period |
| 31 Dec, 23:58 | 0.035 | sculpture and cave painting |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:32 | 0.012 | Winter Solstice Celebrations, Agriculture |
Written records begin
| Date / time | kya | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Dec, 23:59:47 | 5.5 | Native American Circles, First writing, beginning of the Bronze Age |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:48 | 5.0 | First dynasty of Egypt, Early Dynastic period in Sumer, Astronomy, |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:49 | 4.5 | Stonehenge, Alphabet, Akkadian Empire, Wheel |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:51 | 4.0 | Code of Hammurabi, Egyptian Pyramids Built |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:52 | 3.5 | Mycenaean Greece; Olmec civilization; Iron Age in Near East, India, and Europe; founding of Carthage |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:53 | 3.0 | Ancient Olympic games |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:54 | 2.5 | Buddha, Confucius, Qin Dynasty, Classical Greece, Vedas completed, Euclidean geometry, Archimedean physics, Roman Republic |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:55 | 2.0 | Ptolemaic astronomy, Ceasar, invention of numeral 0 |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:56 | 1.5 | Muhammad, Maya civilization, rise of Byzantine Empire |
| 31 Dec, 23:59:58 | 1.0 | Mongol Empire, Crusades, Christopher Columbus voyages to the Americas, Renaissance in Europe |
The current second
| Date / time | kya | Event |
|---|---|---|
| 31 Dec, 23:59:59 | 0.5 | Modern Science and technology, American & French Revolutions, World Wars, Apollo Moon landing |
Below is a video of Carl Sagan explaining the Cosmic Calendar.
Naturalistic Paganism 