Year overview · placed events
Calendar complete
Why this game?
Carl Sagan introduced the Cosmic Calendar in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden and popularised it in Cosmos to give people a visceral sense of deep time — that everything we know as human history is squeezed into the last few seconds of a 13.8-billion-year year, and that the universe was doing perfectly well without us for the other 364 days.
The pace of change at the very end of that calendar keeps accelerating. The steam engine, the railway, and the aeroplane have probably resulted in more change in a century than previous inventions did in a millennium. The world wide web, GPS positioning, the smartphone, streaming, the gig economy, and biometric surveillance: many of the inventions that impact our life today were not even around when we were born.
Machine intelligence is now beginning to reshape work itself, and transform how human minds form, learn and decide. It is becoming hard to tell real from fake; consequential choices are slipping into systems no person controls; and a world of global conflict and personal unease appears to have returned. For most of us the ground feels less solid than it once did — and the pace may accelerate even further.