The folks over at wait but why have created a fantastic series of charts representing different timescales in history. They seek to put a wide range of historical moments into a time perspective.

From the blog:

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.It’s not our fault—the spans of time in human history, and even more so in natural history, are so vast compared to the span of our life and recent history that it’s almost impossible to get a handle on it…To try to grasp some perspective, I mapped out the history of time as a series of growing timelines—each timeline contains all the previous timelines (colors will help you see which timelines are which).

For the full series of charts, head to wait but why.

(h/t boingboing)