Life’s Long Past is a tool I developed using Anthropic’s Claude AI to visualize the relationship of Earth’s geologic history to the origin and evolution of life.

Below the graphic is a discussion of how it was created.

Life’s Long Past opens with the geologic timescale, oxygen and CO2 levels, and Major Events displayed. There’s a Key/Legend box in the upper right that you can move around the page and/or minimize. Note the timescale starts with a logarithmic view so that as it gets closer to now, events are more spread out. Try the other scales– some event sets may display better or worse. Note that only major events are listed initially. Turn on other event types as needed. When a cursor hovers over a time or atmosphere bar, or an event, the time is displayed. Clicking opens an information pane.

I expect to be updating this as I learn more and/or spot errors or problems. Also as the science adds and changes events and interpretations. There might be iterations of this that add other sorts of events. For example, I could add event categories for groups of plants and animals where more detail would be useful or interesting. Insects come to mind, since my Ph.D. was in Entomology and I associate with known entomologists at the University of Arizona.

There’s been a lot of discussion about using AI models to create applications from descriptions and specifications, allowing non-developers to make useful tools and systems. I wanted an interactive graphic that showed when interesting geological and biological events occurred relative to the geologic timeline. I described this to Claude. Claude said it could create a self-contained Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) file I could put on a website. I went through many iterations of instructions, output generation, then evaluation of how the HTML output functioned in a browser. I repeatedly asked Claude to check for errors and hallucinations. I got something usable in a desktop or laptop. Then I realized I needed Claude to add code that caused the HTML file to display decently on mobile devices. That resulted in more cycles of instructions, output evaluation, and testing on actual mobile devices.

Once I had something I was satisfied with, it turned out to be surprisingly easy to incorporate the HTML file into a page on my WordPress website EvolutionsLight.org. I just used my hosting service’s file management tool to copy the HTML file LifesLongPast.html to a directory on the site. Then I created this page, with a custom HTML code block that linked to the file. If I want to make updates and improvements, I just generate a new HTML file, replace the existing file in the website directory, and the page is updated without having to change anything on the actual webpage. I suspect I’ll be using this method a lot for other web pages.