Three Thousandths

[Kelly Holley-Bockelmann] tried to understand the vastness of space-time by imagining the history of the universe laid out across a 100-yard field.  The Earth was born at the 67-yard line.  Complex multicellular life formed after 96 yards.  Apes began to walk upright in the final two inches.  And all of human civilization -- the end of the ice age, the birth of agriculture, every war and every empire -- had come in the last three thousandths of an inch.

-- Eli Saslow, "The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist", New York Times (7 November 2026)