About

Are you the type of person who finds yourself on Wikipedia way too much of the time? Do you start looking up paracetamol and somehow end up reading about the etymology of analgesic, and then look at the origin of language itself?

Over the last few years it has been impossible to hide, try as you might, from the changes happening in the world. I’ve been trying to make sense of this in relation to myself and the people around me, while also trying my best to understand the psyche of the internet and what people actually want. It’s tough at the best of times, but this year has felt particularly acute; I’ve noticed a general sense of anxiety and confusion — often manifesting in apathy or some sort of lack of cosmic agency — among the people around me and in much of what I read online.

It’s worth looking underneath the surface of the arguments between accelerationists and the sprawling politigram of the last half decade, because the same feeling turns up in people with (justifiable) economic anxiety, in the way we talk about health and in the aesthetic movements of the moment: there is something brewing, and though many people are trying, there never seems to be a consensus. The obvious answer is Artificial Intelligence, and the fear that a few people will amass significant power through it. But it is tangled up with current political and geopolitical struggles, and with safety risks across technology, conflict, pathogens and climate that seem to be arriving faster and faster.

There’s a sense that we aren’t prepared for it, or that now is not the time, or that it’s too hard even for a group of experts, let alone an individual, to understand how it’s all happening so fast. Truly big ideas have a habit of being too abstract or buried in coded language and deep, complex data to comprehend. This tool is my personal attempt to step back and consider where we are, with more context than we could normally hold in any one place, and shed a tiny bit of light on the current moment in a way that’s easy to understand.

This is not an original idea: the extraordinary scientist Cesare Emiliani proposed this calendar in 1993, the year I was born. A micropalaeontologist, he pioneered the use of microscopic shells from deep-sea sediments to read the Earth’s climate history, so he was used to thinking at the true, glacial speed of time. I think he understood that a human life is too short a snapshot to comprehend the full picture, and that our place on Earth might make more sense when the planet is viewed as one vast system. His calendar supplies a year zero and puts our collective recorded history on one continuous scale. When I first learned of the concept I felt a bit of a pang in my gut. I like to imagine it was the same pang that European mathematicians had when they encountered zero as a number — developed in India, carried through Arabic and Islamic mathematics and eventually into Europe — that something so obvious could go unseen for so long, but once realised could unlock a new category of understanding.

This tool is not novel in itself, and there have been a ton of different takes on this concept. I’ve found them all lacking in their own ways, or at the very least, not pulling together enough data to do anything other than be a novelty. Don’t get me wrong — I think understanding the sheer span of history is important, but there’s more data available than “x human invent tool in XXXXX HC”, and my feeling in making this is that including this complementary data in a readable way adds an additional layer of wonder to this whole thing. This version uses open data to put the numbers alongside the events and see what they say about our collective trajectory.

I think it’s useful, when considering the whole Earth, and the role that humans are playing in its story, to look out from far beyond, where momentary struggles all seem to dissolve in the face of time and our ongoing ingenuity. That’s not to say they are not deeply important to the way we live our lives right now, or indeed the quality and goodness with which we approach our time on Earth. This is — clearly — important, but only in the way that everything else is.

When the data is viewed on aggregate, it’s clear that Something Is Happening now. Each of these data points is changing on a different scale, but the broad direction is difficult to ignore. Some of the greatest tragedies of the last century, when viewed as part of this data, appear far less noticeable. To be crass, some barely make a dent. I was blown away to see that even the Second World War did little to bend the global population line. The estimate rises every year from 1938 through 1946, which somehow makes the distance between the human catastrophe and the global curve more disorienting. The Great Chinese Famine knocked almost four years off average global life expectancy at its trough and was the type of horror that puts everything into perspective when you study it at school, but across 12,000 years it is easy to miss until you zoom in. By 1962 the line has passed its 1958 level. The financial crisis and COVID-19 show up as bends rather than breaks when viewed from so far above. The ability of the wider thing to absorb what to us are unimaginable catastrophes is remarkable and ungrounding in equal measure. If there is a higher power, do you think they’re paying attention to these, or to the curve itself?

Also remarkable to me are the earliest years catalogued here, and the sheer lack of surviving historical record. A popular conception of archaeology suggests that this is because we simply weren’t up to much, but when put so plainly against the sea level data, you have to wonder how many extraordinary people, inventions and settlements have been lost to the waves in their totality. The chart cannot tell us why the record becomes clearer — writing, settlement, preservation and where archaeologists have been able to look all play their parts — but it does show how far the sea rose over that span. I do hope that we uncover more from this huge span; I’d be delighted if the technologies we’re developing make it happen and change our perspectives once more.

What I mean here is that there’s plenty of value in microscopy, in understanding the how and why and who, but you do have to wonder sometimes whether there’s something else, far more cosmic, more mathematical, more tangible yet far more invisible in action. Something to think about, maybe something to align your priors around. Interpret that as you will, because I certainly wouldn’t claim to have an answer other than that it’s something I’m actively bearing witness to.

I went into this project thinking that it would just be a fun side project for a weekend, but the data surprised me enough to keep iterating and trying to make a little more of it visible here and there in a way that broadly makes sense. The project methodology and dataset attributions are available below.

I hope you find as much wonder in exploring this project as I have in putting it together.