A short talk in pictures
Intelligence vs understanding
The history of the Earth in one day.
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How old is the Earth?
About 4.54 billion years.
Correct
Ask an AI how old the Earth is.
In a second, you get the right answer: about four and a half billion years.
4,540,000,000
years
It is correct. But what did that number just do in your head?
For most of us, not much. It is too big to feel.
So let's keep the fact and change the picture.
Squeeze the whole history of the Earth into a single day.
At midnight, the Earth is born.
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
Before six in the morning, there is life.
Single cells, each far too small to see.
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
Late in the morning, oxygen made by those tiny cells starts to build up in the air.
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
Then the whole afternoon goes by. Evening comes.
And life is still almost all single cells.
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
- Animals
Around nine at night, animals finally appear and spread through the seas.
Dinosaurs, 10:47 to 11:39 pm
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
- Animals
The dinosaurs arrive at about a quarter to eleven.
By 11:39, they are gone.
- No clear signs of life yet
- Almost all single cells
- Animals
- Dinosaurs
And us? On this clock, we are thinner than the line it is drawn with.
So let's zoom in to the last minute.
The whole day
11:59 pmThe last minuteMidnight
- Our species: the last 6 seconds
Our species, Homo sapiens, appears about six seconds before midnight.
The last minute
11:59:59 pmThe last secondMidnight
- Everything ever written: the last 0.1 seconds
- One blink: 0.1 to 0.4 seconds
And everything humans have ever written?
The last tenth of a second. All of it fits inside one blink.
About 4.54 billion years.
The same answer
Now notice something. I have not changed the answer.
This whole day is the same four and a half billion years.
The answer was right all along. Now you can feel it.
Without a comparison
about 1 in 3 numbers remembered
With a familiar comparison
about 1 in 2
This is not just a trick for talks.
Researchers tested the idea with more than three thousand people reading numbers from the news.
Without a comparison, people remembered about a third of the numbers. With a familiar one, about half.
About 4.54 billion years.
Intelligence
gives the right answer
Understanding
connects it to what you already know
That is the gap between intelligence and understanding.
Intelligence gives you the right answer.
Understanding connects it to something you already know: a day, a clock, a blink.
Can you show me what that means?
AI is getting very good at the first part. And you can ask it to help with the second.
Next time you get a right answer, ask one more question: can you show me what that means?
Intelligence knows the Earth is four and a half billion years old.
Understanding knows we arrived six seconds before midnight.
How the clock works
The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Squeeze that history into 24 hours, and one hour stands for about 189 million years, one minute for about 3.2 million years, and one second for about 52,500 years. Each time on the clock is 24 hours multiplied by the share of Earth's history that had passed by then.
| Moment | Years ago | On the clock |
|---|---|---|
| The Earth forms | 4.54 billion | 12:00 am |
| First clear signs of life | 3.48 billion | 5:36 am |
| Oxygen builds up in the air | 2.4 billion | 11:19 am |
| Animals spread through the seas | 538.8 million | 9:09 pm |
| Dinosaurs | 230 million | 10:47 pm |
| The dinosaurs are gone | 66 million | 11:39 pm |
| Our species | 300,000 | 5.7 seconds before midnight |
| Writing begins | 5,200 | 0.1 seconds before midnight |
The long essayThe gap between intelligence and understanding19 min
Sources
- 01Age of the Earth
The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, with an uncertainty of less than 1 per cent. On the clock, this whole span is one day.
- 02Earliest signs of life on land preserved in ca. 3.5 Ga hot spring deposits
Stromatolites and other signs of microbes in 3.48-billion-year-old rocks in the Pilbara, Western Australia: some of the oldest convincing evidence of life. Older claims exist but are disputed, so the clock says only that life was there before 6 am.
- 03The Great Oxygenation Event as a consequence of ecological dynamics modulated by planetary change
Oxygen made by photosynthesising microbes first built up in the atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago.
- 04International Chronostratigraphic Chart
The Cambrian, when animals spread through the seas, began about 538.8 million years ago. The Cretaceous ended 66.0 million years ago, with the extinction of the dinosaurs other than birds.
- 05Where did dinosaurs come from?
The oldest definite dinosaurs date to around 230 million years ago, in the Late Triassic.
- 06New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens
Fossils of our own species dated to about 300,000 years ago. On the clock, that is about six seconds before midnight.
- 07The evolution of writing
Writing first appears in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC, a little over 5,200 years ago: about a tenth of a second on the clock.
- 08The eye, a spy hole on human mind: Spontaneous blink rate and amplitude, and their variability, as new psychobiological markers of anxiety
A complete spontaneous blink lasts about 0.1 to 0.4 seconds.
- 09Improving comprehension of numbers in the news
Three randomised online experiments with more than 3,200 participants. Short comparison sentences, called perspectives, helped people recall numbers, estimate new ones and spot errors. With them, people remembered roughly half of the numbers; without them, about a third.