If you consider our place in the history of the Universe, it is easy to see humans as an insignificant temporal speck, flickering in an unspeakably vast cosmos.

One common analogy illustrates this by telling the story of our planet’s 4.7-billion-year history as if it were the 24 hours of a single day. If you assume that the Earth coalesced an instant after midnight, it took around four hours for the first life to appear: microscopic organisms clustered around hydrothermal vents beneath young oceans. It took five more hours for photosynthesis to begin – and until midday for the atmosphere to become rich in oxygen. By 18:00 we had sexual reproduction; at 22:00 the first ever footprints appeared on land, left by lobster-sized sort-of-centipedes; and by 23:00 the dinosaurs had arrived, only to exit 40 minutes later alongside three-quarters of Earth’s species in the planet’s fifth mass extinction.

Since then, the day’s remaining 20 minutes have seen the rise of the mammals, with something semi-human existing for about the last minute (three million years in real terms). Recorded history has lasted for the last tenth of a second, and the industrial revolution the last five thousandths of a second – by which point our analogy is fast becoming too microscopic to be useful.

You might also like:

So far, so humbling. Looked at another way, however, this exercise emphasises something else. Life on Earth took a long time to get going, and even longer to build civilisations – yet once it did, the results have been remarkable.

Even in the context of several billion years of history, the last few human centuries have been astonishing. Our species has not only reshaped its planet’s biosphere, but is in the middle of engendering changes to its terrain, oceans and climate on a scale only asteroid impacts or centuries of apocalyptic volcanic eruptions previously equalled. The consequences of these changes will be measured in aeons. We have introduced something exponential into the equations of planetary time – and that something is technology.