The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. This is the closest guess anyone has been able to come up with. If one breaks all this macro-scale of time down into one 12 hour "midnight til noon" session we get the following timeline:
0:00 - Creation of Earth
4:30 - First blue-green microbes
9:00 - First unicellular algae
10:30 - First multicellular animals
11:00 - First vertebrates
11:30 - First mammals
30 secs to 12:00 - First man
1/2 second to 12:00 - First modern man
Now, here is where calculations get tricky. I started by timing myself since man was created in the image of God, and found that a normal twiddling of my thumbs occurs at the rate of 2 complete twiddles per second. This was neither an uncomfortable nor compromising pace. It was simply satisfying and relaxing.
Next, you take 11/12 (eleven-twelfths) of the 4.5 billion years of the creation of Earth since that would correspond to the amount of time that had elapsed since vertebrates had evolved. You in turn multiply that number by the number of seconds in a single year. I went ahead and took the liberty of saying one year is actually 365 and 1/4th (one-fourth) days long to count leap years, which should give us a much closer estimate. The final number that shows is rather astonishing.
If God started twiddling his thumbs as soon as creation began and didn't stop until he put vertebrates on the Earth, he would have twiddled 130,089,712,500,000,000,000 times. My hands hurt from typing, imagine how his felt. |
