What has impressed on me most at this point (I'm at around 60,000 years ago, with people in the genus Homo) is the staggering scale of time over which life has evolved. I think it is in our nature to be unable to really understand anything that is not immediately related to us. We think of Humans as being a people that are above evolution, static and unchanging. We see the animals around us as being "complete" animals, no longer evolving. We see a drawing of what a rhino ancestor looked like, and we think it looks incomplete - we think of it has still in the process of evolving towards the modern rhino.
But try to see it from the perspective of the above Indricotherium, alive around 30 million years ago. It wasn't as if things were changing right before its eyes. This species would have existed pretty much unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even a couple million years. Homo sapiens have now been around for less than 200,000 years (our ancestors Homo erectus were around for nearly 2 million years. We got a long way to go to catch up to them.)
Fun fact: the Indricotherium is the largest land mammal to ever exist, more than twice as large as a modern elephant.
Once you start talking in evolutionary timescales you start throwing around millions like they were mere minutes. How many times have I passively read a line like "existed between 23 and 30 million years ago" and thought very little of it? That is a difference of 7 million years! That is a very long time. We cannot properly even begin to understand how long even one million years is. We think that ancient Egypt was forever ago. Six thousand years? That is nothing. That is not even discernible. Beings living a million years from now - if there are any intelligent beings here - will lump us with the ancient Egyptians, and probably with prehistoric humans. "Oh, here we have a fossil of a Homo sapiens, they lived between 1 to 2 million years ago. It is thought they developed the ability to communicate through virtual networks, oh, between 700 thousand and 1 million years ago. We found lots of aluminum cans in this one dig site."
I was so used to reading about astronomical timescales for a while, that now a measly 10 million years sounds like a reasonable amount of time. Ten million years? So what? The Earth has been around for 6 billion years. There are 1000 millions in just one billion. Big deal!
Deep time is a motherfucker that kicks like a horse when it isn't tranquilizing you.
ReplyDelete"I think it is in our nature to be unable to really understand anything that is not immediately related to us. We think of Humans as being a people that are above evolution, static and unchanging. We see the animals around us as being "complete" animals, no longer evolving. We see a drawing of what a rhino ancestor looked like, and we think it looks incomplete - we think of it has still in the process of evolving towards the modern rhino."
Quite. Evolution is an ongoing concern. And it's not all one way, we can go 'downhill' so to speak.
Yeah, I don't know why, but that book really kicked me with it. Thinking about time gone by can be really fun and awe-inspiring - maybe in part because it doesn't threaten the myth that it was all for us - but when Baxter takes it to a future where life is desperately clinging to Earth, where our ancestors have forgone consciousness in favour of basic survival, the thought crosses my mind that eventually it will be as though all that I see around me never existed. That's the great equalizer - in the end there's no difference between Shakespeare and a grain of sand!
ReplyDeleteThankfully, that strain of thought is short-lived, and something inside (on a deep molecular level as Baxter might say) turns us back to the matters at hand.
One of two moments in the whole novel that sticks with me to this day is the diminutive monkey people with their giant nest in the trees somewhere in Africa four million years from now. They decorate their nest with colourful glass bits, what are apparently the groundup remains of car brakelights.
ReplyDeleteThe second is the tree in the the middle of a dessicated supercontinent and the last primate which lives in symbiosis with it. Near, or in the bottom of, a human-made quarry cutting that has been spared over more than a billion years by simple chance.
The third is the mole people.
And of course there is a difference between Shakespeare (to pick an example) and a grain of sand. But it takes a conscious observer to be meaningful.
Yeah, the mole people were interesting, reminds me of little of the morlocks in the Time Machine.
ReplyDeleteConscious observer - agreed - but that's the very thing that might not be here in the end.
Well certainly, we think of ourselves as the universe's special conscious observer, and as much as I know anthropocentrism isn't fashionable... what if we are? (or at least for 'universe', this corner of it).
ReplyDeleteLeaving aside the magpies and the whales and elephants, of course. But they're different kinds of observer.
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