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What comes to mind when you think about the upcoming year? What about the “upcoming” 10 million years? Big difference, obviously, not just in the amount of time but also in how we envision these time spans. In this episode, I share a few fun metaphors for deep time — ways of visualizing (and maybe understanding) the unimaginable.
For more info:
Carl Sagan — Cosmos — cosmic calendar
Earth’s entire history (visualized on a football field)
A glass of whiskey could help you get your head around deep time
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
Hello, everyone. Happy New Year!
This is, of course, a time of year when we traditionally sort of reset time, right? And people make resolutions and they decide this is a whole fresh start. So I hope you’re having a good year so far. It’s only been a very short time.
But in honor of it being the beginning of a new calendar year, I thought I would talk about the concept of time today because this really fascinates me. And I hope you’ll find it interesting too.
So how do you envision the passage of time? For me, when I think about the passage of time, I’m usually thinking about it in terms of my own day-to-day life. And that’s probably the case for you as well. Something that I can relate to, right? And when I imagine the passage of time, I often go back and picture a book that I had when I was a young child. I don’t even remember what the book was about. But I remember that the inside cover had the months of the year laid out. And they were in three rows with pictures. And for each month, there was a picture of a child doing something fun. I remember the colors. Like June was really red. And the fall colors, of course, were orange. And May and April were more green and pink. And the children were doing things like swimming in July. And then, of course, in January, it was all white, and the children were skating.
So I have this visual image of the months of the year laid out like that. And when I think about a year and a year’s time, I actually go back and think about those little children doing fun things throughout the year. And it’s actually kind of like a metaphor of time for me. It’s how I envision or imagine the passage of the months over the year. And you may have something similar in your mind as well.
That’s all nice for the annual calendar. But what about these really long distances in time? Like we think about what is going to happen to the earth in a million years? Will there be people in 10 million years? I don’t know. I don’t think so!
What happens in the future? Or what was it like a billion years ago? Can you even imagine how to conceptualize a billion years? I have a hard time doing that. But we’ll talk a little bit about that today.
You may have heard about some metaphors of long distances of time, or what’s often called “deep time” — ways of envisioning this concept of time that we really cannot envision well, because it’s like beyond the scope of anything that we can really relate to.
The term “deep time” was coined by the American author John McPhee. And he wrote, “Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years — 50,000, 50 million — will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.”
Wow, it is kind of paralyzing, because you just can’t put your mind around it very easily.
So I want to share with you some really interesting metaphors for this idea of deep time. I’ll give you a few examples of some metaphors that I think are kind of fun.
The most familiar one is Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar. And you may have already heard of this. He popularized this concept in his book Cosmos, where he talked about the cosmic calendar as being analogous to one year. So if that’s the case, we can envision the Big Bang being right at the very first moment of January 1 of this year. And then we’ll go through the whole year. And on December 30, the dinosaurs go extinct. So imagine January 1 to December 30, that whole expanse of time, and the dinosaurs are not even extinct until the 30th of December. And then modern humans evolve at 11:52 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. And a normal human lifespan lasts only 23 seconds.
So that cosmic calendar helps to put things in perspective. You can go online and find some interesting graphical representations of Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar.
You can also watch a pretty cool video in National Public Radio’s Skunk Bearer series. I’ll post a link to that. The video is called “Watch Earth’s history play out on a football field.” And this video shows a guy walking down a 100-yard American football field to help us visualize the Earth’s history along the length of that field. And every inch, or about two and a half centimeters, is 1.3 million years. And he shows the one-yard line and says, “This is where there was a catastrophe.” And that catastrophe at the one-yard line was the great extinction 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct and a lot of other species did as well. So that’s one yard from the finish. And then humans appear at almost the very end, almost where the guy’s going to get a touchdown.
And remember, this is just about the Earth’s age, which is about four and a half billion years. We’re not even talking about the universe’s age, which is a little under 14 billion years, which would, of course, require a much bigger football field.
Back to John McPhee and his book, Basin and Range, because he provides a metaphor of the king’s arm. And he says, “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
Wow. Oh my goodness. An English yard is about 0.91 meters. So you can envision stretching out your arm, or the arm of a man, and filing a fingernail once. And that is human history. I find that really impressive.
Another deep time metaphor that I really like is the last one I’ll share with you today. This is from an article I found in theconversation.com. I’ll post a link to this one as well. It’s called “A glass of whiskey could help you get your head around deep time.” The authors of the article trace deep time in a glass of whiskey. And you can do the same thing.
So get out a glass of whiskey and sit back, if you have any whiskey. I don’t even like whiskey. But of course, you can do this in your imagination.
So imagine you’re sitting here with your glass of whiskey. And then you’re thinking about all the different layers of time that went into producing that delicious glass. For example, they talk about the peat smoke used in the malting process.
This mind experiment, by the way, is done in the Orkney Islands, which are the islands just north of Scotland. And when the authors talk about peat, they’re talking about this slow accumulation of the decomposed organic matter that builds up over thousands and thousands of years in these really wet conditions that you can find throughout Scotland and on the Orkney Islands. So they’re thinking about drinking this whiskey, and they’re imagining the thousands of years of peat development that were needed to produce the whiskey and to malt it.
And there’s also such a human history related to the peat, because people had to cut the peat and use it for fuel over many centuries and many millennia. And they had to bring the peat to the whiskey distillery to help create the final product. So you can also bring people and the human factor into the imagination here.
And then think about the water that created this peat. So the water goes back even farther in time, right? You can think about the individual molecules of water and where they came from. And then you’re really getting back into deep time.
You could really do this with just about anything, I think. Looking at an object in your home or something that you drink and saying, well, okay, yeah, maybe it was cultivated last week. Maybe they picked these raspberries for this raspberry tea and made it fresh for me just this week. But what about the soil? And what about the water? And what about the rocks underneath the soil? Those are a lot older.
And a final quote from this article about whiskey that I really love says, “Thought of like this, any object might serve as a lens through which to see deep time’s vivid presence today.”
So again, I invite you to think about things in your environment, in your home, something you might be looking at right now, and its relationship to deep time. Because anything that’s made, for example, of metal, anything that’s made of wood has a history. Everything, every bite of food, every loose coin, a random piece of paper, and it has a history that goes back eons in time.
I just will wrap up by saying that I agree with John McPhee. And I’ll quote him one more time. He said, “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.”
Can we really comprehend this? Or we’re just looking at these metaphors to give it a try? This is not the last time I’m going to be talking about lengthy expanses of time, because I find the concept so awe-inspiring and so weird to think about. So you’ll be hearing about that again.
But until then, have a good day, and I’ll talk to you next time.