Eons, Epochs & Eras / To Shape a Bone From The Sky, 2023

This work is about the origins, evolution, and the future unraveling of all known things. Rendered as a variation of a cosmological timeline of the entirety of the known past, present and far future, it attempts to plot the achingly vast Universe from the moment of the Big Bang to the 'heat death' of everything we know. It’s about traveling through deep time, seeing it all at-a-glance, and hints at the puzzles of existence–why there is something rather than nothing–and how it is all connected.
Beginning with the inflationary period, the evolution of the universe is shown at 10-18 seconds, 10-6 seconds, 102 seconds, 300,000 years old, 1 billion years old, 14 billion years old, and beyond. Including markers for the emergence of galaxies, neutrinos, atoms, electrons, neturons, positrons, muons, taus, quarks, gluons, Higgs Boson, dark matter, photons, weak force carriers and atomic nuclei, we are brought to the here-and-now.

Beyond that point, I mark time based on projections for the future. At 100,000 years, constellations are no longer recognizable. At 250 million years, the continents merge because of continental drift, again forming a supercontinent, and the moon is thrown farther from Earth. At 800 billion years, Earth becomes inhospitable for complex life due to the sun’s increasing brightness. At 1 billion years, Earth’s oceans begin to disappear as the sun’s hydrogen supply decreases and temperatures rise. At 1.3 billion years, all eukaryotic life perishes as a result of the extreme temperatures and low carbon dioxide levels. At 1.75 billion years the Earth moves out of the habitable zone. Between 3-4 billion years the Earth’s core solidifies and at 3.5 billion years the Earth starts to resemble Venus in surface conditions, due to high temperatures and a runaway greenhouse effect. At 4.8 billion years the sun dies. At 5 billion years, “Milkdromeeda” will emerge when the Andromeda galaxy collides with our galaxy, the Milky Way. At 6 billion years into the future, our solar system dies, and after our sun exists the red giant phase, its mass will be concentrated into a dense stellar core called a white dwarf and its gas will twist into filamentary knots of material–a planetary nebula–that will glow brightly for a few thousand years, before fading forever into an ever-quickly expanding universe.