AaS! 103: What's wrong with the cosmic calendar?
Ask a Spaceman!
Paul M. Sutter
4.8 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is the “cosmic calendar”? What are some important scales in the universe? Why is it so hard to judge “importance” of events? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!
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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.
Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The next time you're in a jungle, and for the purposes of this introduction, illustration, I'm going to assume that you go to the jungle often. |
| 0:15.5 | But the next time you're in a jungle, I want you to just pause for a moment. Just pause. Stop moving. And just pay attention. |
| 0:27.0 | Just listen. Just watch. Just letting yourself be absorbed by the nature around you. |
| 0:33.6 | Look around very carefully. And listen, very carefully. You might notice some things. you might notice some things you might notice |
| 0:38.1 | some things that you may not have noticed if you're walking through the jungle just crashing through |
| 0:42.2 | with your machete you know doing jungly adventure things you might notice some birds starting to fly |
| 0:48.4 | around or nest you might notice some bugs crawling around maybe there's a jaguar prowling by. And if you pay a lot |
| 0:58.1 | of attention for enough time, you'll even see the trees growing. There's a lot of different |
| 1:03.4 | things happening in a jungle all at the same time. And they all have different time scales, right? Like, from the perspective |
| 1:15.0 | of a tree that's slowly growing over the course of decades, that's, that's a slow thing, right? |
| 1:24.6 | Compare that to, like, a bug that might be alive for a week and is crawling around as fast as |
| 1:29.8 | it can trying to get food. In even your own perspective, your own human perspective where you can |
| 1:35.1 | be in this jungle for maybe a day and that's your entirety of your jungle experience. There's |
| 1:41.1 | all these different time scales associated with different things |
| 1:47.0 | in the jungle. And I want you to keep this jangly metaphor mind of how you can just sit |
| 1:55.9 | somewhere in nature and experience different kinds of times of timescales and different kinds of activities |
| 2:04.2 | all happening simultaneously and in parallel. I want you to keep in mind because I'm going to rant |
| 2:10.4 | about the cosmic calendar. You may have heard about the cosmic calendar is the device used in |
| 2:17.3 | the Cosmo series, and I've |
| 2:18.6 | seen it in a few other places, where it lays out some major cosmic events. And it does so by |
| 2:26.7 | taking the past 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and compressing it down into a single |
| 2:33.1 | Earth solar calendar year. |
... |
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