Happy Darwin Day

I hope that you've all had a great Darwin Day today. Today I couldn't get this quote out of my head:

"The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution."

That was said by the great Carl Sagan, a man who seemed to be able to verbalise a meaning to things in a way that I can only ever dream of.

If you were to take the whole of cosmic time and compress it down to a year, the history of our solar system doesn't really begin until September, and humans don't register until New Years Eve.

In another example, if you were to take the history of our little planet and condense it down to 24 hours, humans arrive on the scene literally just before midnight (we're talking in the last twenty to thirty seconds here).

So I don't think evolution has done too bad to get us where we are. That's the wonder of life and that's the awesomeness of our universe, and it is definitely something worth celebrating.

Happy Darwin Day all!

Picture courtesy of Colin Purrington.