Modern humans have been on Earth less than .01% of the planet’s existence.

The Earth has been around for a while — about one-third as long as the universe itself. By comparison, Homo sapiens are the new kids on the block. Earth’s story began at the outset of the Hadean eon, about 4.6 billion years ago. It took 600 million years just for the Earth’s crust to take shape, another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to pop up, and about 3.2 billion years after that for life to really get going thanks to the evolutionary burst known as the Cambrian explosion. Several mass extinction events and some 465 million years later, mammals finally took center stage, but modern humans didn’t enter the biological limelight for another 65 million years. With the first Homo sapiens appearing around 300,000 years ago, humans have only been on planet Earth for 0.0067% of its existence. 

In those 300,000 years, humans have been pretty busy. For a couple thousand years, we harnessed fire and lived a nomadic existence, until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the very first civilizations began to take shape. Since then, humans have been on a meteoric trajectory, going from hunter-gatherer to spacefarer in less than 6,000 years. Carl Sagan famously displayed the universe’s history on a 365-day calendar, with the Big Bang on January 1 and our current moment starting at 12:01 a.m. the next year. On that timeline, it’s only at 10:30 p.m. on December 31 that humans first appear, and all of recorded history is squeezed into just a few seconds — but what a few seconds it’s been.