A navigable map of deep time — from the Big Bang to now, into the futures thinkers imagine and the iconic ones that never arrived.

The axis is logarithmic: each step of the ruler is ×10 in time. Filled dots on the line are thresholds — they change what we can do, so they carry a window, not a countdown. Hollow rings above it are waypoints: dated steps toward a threshold, each with a live countdown.

The thread along the axis carries how long each wait actually lasted, and whether the step followed from the one before it: solid when it did, dashed when something external merely lifted a constraint, broken when nothing guaranteed it.

A track can carry a second band below the axis, in its own colour: a lineage that runs through the same years without descending from the first. Two tracks use one: Alcohol & cocktails puts the Italian aperitivo below the line, spending two centuries taking the dose down while the line above it breaks ceilings; Climate keeps the whole trunk above the axis and runs the planet's own history underneath it, so you can see which human step sits above which climate step. Each band keeps its own thread.

A gold ring marks a change of substrate for information — the genome, culture, writing, print, silicon, the network, model weights. Each rung cuts the time constant by orders of magnitude. That staircase, not any single invention, is the acceleration.

What the spacing says, read end to end: life is easy, the complex cell is hard, and everything after the cell is fast. Life arrives 800 million years after the planet forms. The complex cell takes another two billion — and happens once. Multicellularity, right after it, evolves independently dozens of times. From the first bodies to now is 575 million years, and writing is in the last 5,200 of them. If that is the real shape then the filter is behind us rather than ahead, which is one answer to Fermi’s question and the most optimistic one. One sample is not a statistic. And the ruler now runs as far right as it does left: from here to maximum entropy is 100 orders of magnitude, and the era with stars in it is the first 14 of them.

Scroll or drag to travel · tap a dot to go to it · tap elsewhere to pause. In the Cosmic clock, drag the hand: every full turn is one decade closer to now.

All of it in words → — every event as text, with the sources.

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