This app is a weekend project I just built for fun. It's inspired by a log-scale geologic timeline I created with a friend in high school in the 1970s, on an adding-machine tape. We took the logarithms of the dates of all kinds of paleological events, plotted them on the 40' long tape, and hung it up in the classroom. We realized we could fit the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and what we ate for breakfast that day on the same scale! I still have that tape somewhere, and I've been wanting to create an interactive version for many many years.

My goal is to inspire people to think about how we fit into the bigger "deep time" picture and think about the long term. The idea of a log-scaled timeline is that ancient events are compressed, and recent events take up more space. Each piece of the timeline covers 10x as much time as the piece to its right (like the film "Powers of Ten" but for time). We humans are naturally oriented toward short-term thinking: tomorrow, next week, a human lifetime. This app puts that in context, so you can see how the present smoothly fades into the very deepest past.

You can zoom in on any time period in the history of the universe. Significant events (my subjective judgment) from politics, art, science, and nature fade in as you zoom into them. It also has a "news feed" so new events will populate in on the right edge every now and then. I tried to optimize for desktop, mobile and tablet. Getting the events to flow and display nicely was the biggest challenge.

I used AI to assist, mostly Claude and some gptel. This is the biggest project I've done with an AI "intern." My takeaway is it's helpful until it gets stuck (badly), and then I have to take over and fix things. It can be surprisingly creative as well as doing the grunt work. Source is at https://github.com/garyo/deep-time-timeline.