The earth is over 5 billion years old. Life first originated in the oceans 3.4 billion years ago. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years in the past. Human recorded history stretches back 10,000 years in time.

These numbers are too large to visualize, and difficult to compare. That's why a timeline is interesting : an image sometimes says more than one thousand words. Hotu.org (HistoryOfTheUniverse.org) offers a nice timeline of the last 15 billion years of Earth. More impact on the climate of the last aeons can be found Climate Timeline Tool. Some others exagerate a bit in the visualisation of this timeline : the history on a toilet roll.

Interested in the future ? Faction Earth gives a probable future of the next 150 years : accelarated population growth and the formation of city clusters aka city plexes. Corporate and biological warfare with the origin of mutant humans and extinct life on Mars. Luckily, this possible future is all part of a computer game.