Cosmic Calendar

The Cosmic Calendar is a method to visualize the chronology of the universe, scaling its currently understood age of 13.8 billion years to a single year in order to help intuit it for pedagogical purposes in science education or popular science.

The Phanerozoic corresponds only to the latter half of December, with the Cenozoic only happening on the penultimate day on the Calendar.

The concept was popularized by Carl Sagan in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden and on his 1980 television series Cosmos.

[2] Sagan goes on to extend the comparison in terms of surface area, explaining that if the Cosmic Calendar were scaled to the size of a football field, then "all of human history would occupy an area the size of [his] hand".

[3] The Cosmic Calendar was reused in the 2014 sequel series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

A graphical view of the Cosmic Calendar, featuring the months of the year, days of December, the final minute, and the final second