What If Time Ran Backwards and Couldn't Stop?

At 5:42 in the afternoon, time starts running backwards. The leaves lift off the pavement and go back to their branches. The Sun climbs back up the sky and sets in the east. You stand exactly where you are, your watch still ticking forward, and one second for you rewinds a day out there, then a year, then a million years, and it never stops. Your street un-builds. The ice comes back. The asteroid un-hits. The Moon falls back into the Earth, the Sun goes out, and you keep going, all the way back to the one moment time can't go past. The readout in the corner is the date the whole way; the second one is your own watch. The big numbers are real. The last mammoths were still alive when the Great Pyramid had been standing for 500 years. 125,000 years ago, hippos swam in the Thames. The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs hit 66 million years ago; they had been around for 165 million. Late in their time the seas were about 170 metres higher than today. 252 million years ago almost everything alive died. Dragonflies 300 million years ago had wings 70 cm across. 620 million years ago a day was about 22 hours long, and before that the whole planet froze over, more than once. There has been oxygen in the air for about 2.4 billion years; the oldest fossils are 3.48 billion years old; the Moon is about 4.5 billion. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Its oldest light, set free 380,000 years after the beginning, is still all around us, and some of the static on an old TV was made of it. Some of it is not real, or not known. Your street, its houses, its farm and its city are made up; so is where it is (somewhere near 40 degrees north). Whether that spot was under the ice, or under the Cretaceous sea, depends on where exactly it is. The asteroid, the Moon falling back and the Earth coming apart are far too fast to see at that speed; they are slowed down and drawn so you can. Some numbers are estimates with wide ranges: the height of the old sea, the height of the mountains in the middle of Pangaea (we say "as high as the Andes"; some say the Himalayas), how long a day was a billion years ago, whether the young Earth's sky was orange. Nobody knows when life began. Nobody can calculate what happened before about 10^-43 seconds. And what happens at zero is made up. You stood there for ten minutes. Out there, 13.8 billion years went by. Backwards. 0:00 Your street, 5:42 pm 0:15 The Sun sets in the east 0:21 Days, then seasons 0:45 The house across the street 0:57 Before you were born 1:02 Your street un-builds 1:09 The farm 1:34 The forest 1:55 The year 1 2:00 The pyramids, mammoths, farming 2:19 The ice 2:57 The first humans 3:25 Lucy 4:20 The asteroid 4:31 Under the sea 5:20 Pangaea 5:34 The Great Dying 5:56 The first forest 6:17 Snowball Earth 7:07 No oxygen 7:31 The Earth un-made 7:49 The cloud the Sun was born from 8:18 The galaxies rush in 8:52 The dark 9:04 The sky catches fire 9:43 The first second 9:54 Zero #whatif #science #time #space #universe