4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it for the sense of perspective it gives on deep time and how brief human history is.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec sillysaurusx · 2023-11 · on “Before-and-after images show how Greenland's glaciers have rapidly retreated”
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.
Strong rec gcanyon · 2024-11 · on “NASA: Mystery of Life's Handedness Deepens”
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]
Recommends nlehuen · 2024-08 · on “Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean”
This video puts things into perspective, mapping the whole of 4.5B years of Earth history to 1 hour: [this video]
Recommends 8fingerlouie · 2025-04 · on “How many supernova explode every year?”
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 b