I recently stumbled on an interview with cyberneticist
Heinz von Foerster–
 http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html
–where he described a _logarithmic_ timeline of history
that he constructed, on the theory that the farther back
you go the sparser the ‘events’ become.

I decided to try implementing this using my own theory
of hypertext-timelines, aiming for a 100k page packed
with links to Web resources on every topic from the Big
Bang to the dotcom bubble:
 http://www.robotwisdom.com/science/logarithmic.html

But this design works best only if I can dig up _some_
newsworthy entry for every line… and cosmology seems
to be empty-handed for the ~40 lines between 12Byo and
5Byo: (the line-number is the exponent, eg 10^10.14 years)

10.14 = 13,700,000,000 years BC = Big Bang
10.13: release of Cosmic Microwave Background
10.12: first galaxies, of iron-free stars
10.11: quasars with (unexpected) iron
10.10 = 12,500,000,000 yrs BC
10.09
10.08: Iron Epoch (supernovae creating iron)
10.07
[...] no ‘news’ for seven billion years!?
9.71
9.70 = 5,000,000,000 years BC
9.69: birth of Sun

So is there any useful way to fill this gap?  Some
ideas:

- declining rates of new-star formation?
– increasing percentage of heavier elements?
– declining _size_of newly-formed stars?
– generalisations about stellar lifecycles

Ideally, the entries should suggest increasing
likelihood of life’s emerging, but if worse
comes to worse I may have to settle for random
observations like quasars or supernovae at 10B
lightyears’ distance.