When work and life get stressful, I like to stop, take a deep breath and take a few moments to put things in perspective. I have found the incredibly talented speakers at TED to be a great way to inspire and set me straight. Recently, it was a fascinating discussion about the origins of life.
Consider, for instance, the fact that modern humans have only inhabited the earth for 200,000 years. To put this in perspective, if the earth was 24 hours old, we have only existed for the last minute and 15 seconds. More interestingly, we did not start roaming the earth until about 70,000 years ago when the last ice age cut our population down to an estimated 2,000 people, and we were forced to seek new lands to inhabit.
We went from the verge of extinction to where we are today in a relatively remarkable short period of time. Now that’s perspective.
This perspective continues when you consider just how far the Internet has progressed in just 20 years. Consider, for instance, that to reach 50 million users, it took the telephone 75 years, but the Internet only four. More impressive, the Angry Birds app needed only 35 days.
If that does not blow your mind, consider just a few of these other amazing statistics about the Internet, all of which have evolved over the past two decades…
