Imagine if we could condense the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth into just one hour. If we could do this, dinosaurs would appear at the 56th minute and disappear just three minutes later. Modern humans (our relatives) would show up right at the end of the hour, having only 0.2 seconds available to them.

In AN, David J. Smith, author of the bestselling If the World Were a Village, brings large, incomprehensible concepts into smaller scales—from the vast expanse of geological and human history to the size of our planet and galaxy—with surprising results… if the Sun were the size of an orange, the Earth would be the size of a grain of salt. Even the largest planet, Jupiter, would be just as big as a large pea.

If we represented the average life expectancy with footprints in the sand, North Americans would leave 78 footprints, Europeans 76 footprints, Asians 70 footprints, and Africans 58 footprints. If all the water on Earth were 100 glasses of water, all the fresh water available to us that we need to survive would be just one of those glasses.

AN brings great concepts into smaller scales—space, time, human inventions, global population, the resources available to us, and much more—and invites the reader to see the world in a new, different way.