570 million years of evolution in 60 seconds (video)

This short video beautifully illustrates the history of life (as we know it) on Earth in just 60 seconds.

Its real point, I think, is that humans are pretty new at all of this which is true. People tend to take this though as some kind of admonishment or warning: a sort of “we’re pretty new so we’d better behave and stop messing things up” ish … thing.

Personally I take it as a really remarkable fact. We haven’t been on earth for very long; our ‘civilization’ started a mere 12,000 years ago, we just figured out motorized transportation about a hundred years ago – a split second historically speaking. Despite all of this we are now getting ready to put colonists on Mars and take control of our own evolution by manipulating and engineering DNA.

Yes, humans can be idiots. People have done some remarkably stupid things. However, we are also one of the most remarkable stories in the Universe (as far as we know).