> There's this joke where I can never remember the exact scale, but it goes something like this:
>
> "A billion (1000000000) years ago the earth was created.
> A billion days ago life came on to land.
> A billion hours ago man came down from the trees.
> A billion minutes ago Jesus died.
> A billion seconds ago was 1970.
> A billion dollars is yesterday in Washington."
>
> julian

It would be very interesting to hear the properly-scaled version of this jest. About a billion seconds ago, it was indeed 1970. About a billion minutes ago, Jesus was crucified. But from thereon, humanity never did evolve in the trees; and similarly, the earliest life on land first developed during the Silurian period (440 million years ago, or mya) in the form of vascular plants. The earth itself was created about 4.6 billion years ago (~5 bya). I wonder if there's a factor of four involved, somewhere, in this particular set of timeframe calculations.

Wolfspirit