Newton made time absolute, and for centuries afterwards clocks chimed through Europe with precise regularity, one second1 after another, as the clockmakers labored to make time more and more precise, as the historians and geologists and physicists worked to send the evenly spaced timegrid backwards to the dawn of the universe.

Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external…

Geologic and even historic time are basically incomprehensible to humans, as evidenced by the eternal popularity on Reddit of facts along the following lines:

  • Cleopatra was born closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid
  • Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
  • T-rex lived closer to today than it did to the Stegosaurus

One small hook I use to grapple with this is to compare the duration of events to how long ago they were. I discovered this in my own life first. Four years after graduating, I realized that I had been out of college for longer than I had been in college. This then became a kind of natural lens with which to look at past jobs, relationships, and other such periods. I’m at almost exactly this point with respect to my first tech job: I was there for 3 years and 3 months, and left exactly that long ago.

Turning towards history, I usually find that I’ve underestimated historical time durations. To get some examples, I pulled Wikipedia’s list of empires into a csv using this tool. I then cleaned it up a bit and did a bit of manipulation in a jupyter notebook. You can download the cleaned csv and the notebook or view the full notebook html here.

Here are empires with an “inflection point” within 50 years of today. A negative number means the inflection point has passed, and a positive number means its upcoming.

Empire Origin From To calc_duration years_ago_ended years_to_inflection
0 Safavid dynasty Persia 1501 1736 235 284 -49
1 Georgian Empire Georgia 1008 1490 482 530 -48
2 Zulu Empire South Africa 1818 1897 79 123 -44
3 Mali Empire West Africa 1235 1610 375 410 -35
4 Mughal Empire India 1526 1758 232 262 -30
5 Toungoo dynasty Toungoo 1510 1752 242 268 -26
6 Italian Empire Italy 1885 1943 58 77 -19
7 Sokoto Caliphate West Africa 1804 1903 99 117 -18
8 Bamana Empire West Africa 1712 1861 149 159 -10
9 Duchy of Savoy Savoy 1416 1713 297 307 -10
10 Omani Empire Oman 1698 1856 158 164 -6
11 Konbaung dynasty Myanmar 1752 1885 133 135 -2
12 Belgian colonial empire Belgium 1901 1962 61 58 3
13 Empire of Japan Japan 1868 1947 79 73 6
14 Pahlavi dynasty Persia 1925 1979 54 41 13
15 British Raj Indian Subcontinent 1858 1947 89 73 16
16 Empire of Great Fulo Senegal 1514 1776 262 244 18
17 Kingdom of Prussia Germany 1701 1871 170 149 21
18 Lakota people Great Plains 1700 1877 177 143 34
19 Qajar dynasty[citation needed] Persia 1794 1925 131 95 36
20 Khmer Empire Cambodia 802 1431 629 589 40

The one that really jumps out to me is the Khmer Empire, maybe because of my recent connection to Cambodia. It lasted 629 years! That means if it were ending today, it would have started 100 years before Columbus sailed to America.

Or take the Belgian Empire. Lasted 61 years and about to hit the time-inflection point. It fits comfortably within my dad’s lifetime.

As I tweeted, I would like to find the right terminology for these kinds of moments – I find them personally meaningful and a small useful tool for understanding time.

  1. 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom, if you must know. ↩