Here are the geological facts: our home planet is approximately 4.6 billion years old. Our species in its modern form, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been around for about 300,000 to 400,000 years. These are big numbers. Huge numbers are things everyone pretends to understand, but are all really incapable of wrapping their minds around. After all, at a neurological level, humans are visually capable of instinctively distinguishing between "one," "two," "three," "four," "five," and "a lot." To give us more understandable comprehension of the natural history of the world and where we place in it, here is a brief timeline of Earth, condensed into a single year.
January 1st is roughly when swirling chunksof heavier elements blasted throughout space by an exploding star all clumped together into sphere, shaped and crafted by our friend, Gravity. Unfortunately, Mother Earth doesn't get a birthday, and not just because she came around before primates started making calendars. The formation of our planet was not an event, but a long process.
Throughout January, this fiery hunk of rock hurtling through space cooled off and settled into a consistent orbit. Chemical and geological processes released gases held to the surface by gravity into an atmosphere of sorts and created a more stable surface consisting of water, aluminum, molten rock, and carbon compounds. Somewhere around the end of February or beginning of March, some whiz-bang chemistry wizardry cranked out organic compounds that formed the first prototypes of cells. With reproduction and mutation, the craziness we call natural selection began its work.
Ancestors of algae dominated the planet for the next few months, causing enormous changes in the make-up of our atmosphere. Oxygen, a poisonous gas to most organisms, became a major component of the air, prompting new evolutionary developments. By mid-August, more than halfway through the year, complex eukaryotic cells appeared. Multi-cellular marine life didn't come about until about the middle of November. As November ended and transitioned in December, the first plants began pioneering dry land. Animals did not do so until a few days later with the ancestors of amphibians (more like lungfish than frogs). Over the next week, dry land became covered with scrawny non-vascular plants like moss, along with fungi and algae, which developed into terrestrial swamps. Then suddenly, on December 12, an unexplained event obliterated almost all life on earth, eliminating an estimated 95% of all species completely. Although the word "extinction" usually makes us think of T-rex and dodos, comparing the Cambrian extinction to what killed the dinosaurs is like comparing the Holocaust to the Boston Massacre.
With all of those open niches for exploitation, life exploded again to fill the space. Early dinosaurs were trundling Pangaea by December 13. A week later, flowering plants revolutionized the flora-fauna relationships of ecology. Then, at the very end of December 26, the dinosaurs were wiped out when our planet crossed the path of what probably was a very big meteor turned meteorite. The Age of Mammals began, less than a week before the present day.
On the very last day of the year, early hominids developed in Africa in the evening. Homo sapiens (which includes both us and our close cousins, Neandertals) evolved at around 11:45 PM. The first agrarian societies began one minute before midnight (which, incidentally, is just milliseconds before the time the Bible puts the creation of the universe). Jesus was born around 11:59:45, fifteen seconds before midnight. The eternal Roman Empire took up the next five seconds. The Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence at a little less than two seconds to midnight. The Cold War lasted about the last third of a second. In those past two seconds, we consumed most of the fossil fuels that took the last month to form.
Calling our existence on Earth a blink of an eye is much too generous. Nothing gives one's existence perspective like insignificance. So remember, as crazy as things seem here and now, we are not even a flash in the pan on a tiny orb of rock circling an insignificant star in a typical galaxy in an inconceivably enormous universe. Yeah, we like to think that we're relevant and that we're special. But let's be realistic. It is our narcissistic delusion of self-importance that really makes us lose sight of the bigger picture. Come on, now, humanity. Take a deep breath, look up at the sky, and understand: we're pretty small.
No comments:
Post a Comment