There's really good click-n-learn earth science stuff on Berkeley's Explorations Through Time website. I found it while looking for humanity-in-relation-to-geologic-time analogies.There are a bunch: the toilet paper roll is good, and so is the beer glass (you gotta scroll down). The Berkeley site uses a book. I can't remember where my favourite one came from (Stephen Jay Gould? My friend Ben?) but it goes like this: Suppose the length of your arm represents geologic time. Now take a nail file and make one swipe across the tip of the nail on your middle finger. The width of the amount of nail you removed represents the length of time that humans have been in existence. This one, from Ohio History Central, is good too: Geologic time covers a VERY long period of time, often counting hundreds, even thousands of millions of years. If we think in terms of human life-spans --- using 70 years as the average --- one hundred million years would be the equal to about 1.43 million human lives strung out in succession, one after the other.

shit! that's crazy.
- anonymous (guest) 7-06-2005 4:13 am

There's a great one at the planetarium in New York. There's a long walkway that represents all of time with humanity taking up about 4 inches at the very end. It's nice because you had to move your body through space to witness it all.
Best thing there actually.
- joester 7-06-2005 10:48 am

that's funny, i've always thought of humanity as an ingrown toenail on the leg of history
- rusty_k 7-07-2005 1:57 am