Sentences with phrase «mere blink of an eye»

A mere blink of the eye.

For an M - star whose activity is amped up like that of a Tasmanian devil, the habitable period could be cut by a factor of about 1,000 — reducing it to a mere blink of an eye in geological terms.

Our expectations of our bodies, their functional capacity and their term of service, are profoundly different from those of people living in the mid-19th century and, in the great scheme of things, that is a mere blink of an eye.

That may seem a mere blink of an eye, but it is far longer than other efforts with the technique and shows for the first time that it is possible to hold the gas in a steady state — the researchers stopped only when their machine ran out of juice.

When compared to those timescales, 150 years of thermometer readings is a mere blink of an eye.

This may sound like a fairly benign sort of natural cycle, until you realize that a couple of hundred years is a mere blink of an eye compared to the millions of years it took for the planet to build up those resources.

Not exact matches

Just 70 000 years — the merest eye - blink of geological time — covers our ancestors» transformation from smart ape to self - conscious Homo sapiens.

In a lower return environment, the true tax deferral benefit of extending the average holding period of an investment from 2 years to 5 years — chopping the portfolio turnover rate from 50 % down to 20 % — is actually less than 5 basis points, which can be made up in the blink of an eye through a lower cost investment change or a mere day's worth of relative returns (not to mention weeks, months, or years)!»

Then suddenly, in the last ten thousand years — a mere 0.4 % eye blink of time — our population increased over 1000 times, we decimated the earth's stocks of non-renewable resources, we cut down over 90 % of the planet's forests, we fished her oceans to the edge of extinction, and we live in a near - constant state of conflict with each other.

In the succeeding two and a half centuries, a mere blink in the eye of cosmic time, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased 31 percent.