On November 21, 1783, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes drifted over Paris in a Montgolfier balloon: the first untethered human flight. Antarctica, on the other hand, wasn't sighted until January 1820, by the Russian expedition of Bellingshausen and by British naval officer Edward Bransfield. James Cook had come close in the 1770s without ever seeing it. For nearly forty years, people could fly without knowing a whole continent existed.
Around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, became high priestess of the Moon god at Ur. She composed hymns to the goddess Inanna and put her name to them. She is the oldest person identified as the author of a literary work, about 1,500 years before Homer.
Squeeze Earth's 4.5 billion years into a single 24-hour day. Homo sapiens shows up around 11:59:54 p.m., roughly six seconds before midnight. All of written history, from Sumerian tablets to today, fits into the final tenth of a second. A cosmic blink.