Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2025
1:03:31 · 18M views · Nov 10, 2023
Kurzgesagt's hour-long animated film that compresses Earth's 4.5 billion year history into one hour, roughly a million years per second. It follows the evolution of life through to humanity's tiny final stretch.
HN commenters recommend it for the sense of perspective it gives on deep time and how brief human history is.
4 comments from Hacker News
Kurzgezazegg’t posted a video showing all of the Earth’s six billion year history in one hour. Time flows at about a million years per second: this video It gives a nice perspective, and it’s a visceral reminder that the planet has been through far worse than us. I find it comforting that even if we drive ourselves to extinction, life itself will continue on. And in the multicellular era, too. This is important, because whoever (or whatever) comes after us might still have a shot at colonizing Mars. It may seem like Earth has lots of time to do it, but the video shows just how precious our tiny slice is.
For a really brilliant visualization of the time scale, I can't recommend this Kurzgesagt video highly enough. It's an animation of the condition of the entire history of the Earth, at 1.5 million years per second of video. this video
Technically you can live forever in a universe that is completely empty, it'll just be a lot of cold dark nothing for eternity. Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour ( this video ). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it. Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun. Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth. Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out. You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years
This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: this video