The Cosmic Calendar

September 15, 2011

In this excerpt from the first episode of his TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan imagines how the history of the universe would look if set against a regular Gregorian calendar:

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

– Carl Sagan