Folks,
Here's the piece I read to you in class today to illustrate how quickly events around us are unfolding, especially when compared to geological time...
[W]e can depict Mother Earth as a lady of 46, if her “years” are megacenturies. The first seven of those years are wholly lost to the biographer, but the deeds of her later childhood are to be seen in old rocks in Greenland and South Africa. Like the human memory, the surface of our planet distorts the record, emphasising more recent events and letting the rest pass into vagueness – or at least into unimpressive joints in worn down mountain chains.
Most of what we recognise on Earth, including all substantial life, is the product of the past six years of the lady’s life. She flowered, literally, in her middle age. Her continents were quite bare of life until she was getting on for 42 and flowering plants did not appear until she was 45 – just one year ago. At that time the great reptiles, including the dinosaurs, were her pets and the break-up of the last supercontinent was in progress.
The dinosaurs passed away eight months ago, and the upstart mammals replaced them. In the middle of last week, in Africa, some man-like apes turned into ape-like men and at the weekend Mother Earth began shivering with the latest series of ice ages. Just over four hours have elapsed since a new species calling itself Homo Sapiens started chasing the other animals and in the last hour it has invented agriculture and settled down. A quarter of an hour ago, Moses led his people to safety across a crack in the Earth’s shell, and about five minutes later Jesus was preaching on a hill farther along the fault-line. Just one minute has passed, out of Mother Earth’s 46 “years”, since man began his industrial revolution, three human lifetimes ago. During that minute he has multiplied his numbers and his skills prodigiously and ransacked the planet for metal and fuel.
(From p. 11 of Restless Earth, a geology textbook by Nigel Calder published in 01972.)
1 comment:
I really loved this article. There are many analogies regarding the age of man in comparision to that of mother earth, but for some reason, the magnitude and significance of the idea really hit home with this article. Not only did it illucidate the fact that homosapeins have been in existence for only a brief amount of time when compared to the lifespan of the planet, but it makes the age of technology and the industrial revolution seem almost none existent because its so dwarfed by the age of everything else. The current reality of technology, however, is not at all none existent, but rather everywhere around us. In today's society we are completely immeresed in it, and its scarey because the reperccusions and true effects of technology have yet to be seen.
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