One Day

Abstract

It is difficult to make sense of the development of our universe owing to the enormous range of timescales involved. To make this more comprehensible, let us rescale our unit of time by compressing the entire 13.8-billion-year history of the universe into exactly one solar day—that is into a 24-hour timeline. This means that every hour that passes on our new clock represents 575 million years of history, each minute corresponds to almost 10 million years and each second is 160,000 years. I will describe some of the most important moments in the formation of cosmic structures, alongside the development of life on our planet. We can then at least appreciate the relative times between events. This will establish the place of our species in the grand scheme of things.