The living tech tree of civilization. Loading 3.3 million years…
What moved in science and technology, read each morning and filed by domain. Each spark past the tree's rim is one of these.
The exponentials underneath the tree. Real data, refreshed daily from Our World in Data and Epoch AI.
Stone to Silicon is a map of how technology builds on itself, from the first chipped stone to the chip. Every node is a capability humanity gained, placed by when it first worked, and wired to the earlier capabilities it could not have existed without. The center is 3.3 million years ago. The glowing rim is today. Past the rim, faintly, are projections.
Time is logarithmic: the last century gets as much room as the hundred thousand years before it, because that is roughly where the branching happens. Select any node to light up its entire ancestry.
The tree grows daily. A pass reads new papers, model releases and science news each morning, files them in the Frontier feed, and grafts the rare genuine milestone onto the tree as a provisional node. The curves are live data from Our World in Data and Epoch AI (both CC BY 4.0).
Pictures are lead images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, credited on each photo under its own license. Videos come from YouTube and only load when you press play. Beyond Our World in Data and Epoch AI, some curves are compiled by hand from documented records (fastest computers since 1938, human speed, transatlantic crossings, fusion triple product, qubits, deep-time GDP), with sources listed. A hatched stretch on a chart marks historical reconstruction, not measurement.
Hand-curated history, machine-assisted present. Corrections welcome. A Crest Systems project.