Portugal is going through a severe financial and economic crisis. You can read all about it in the press (national and international), and I promise you this post is not about that!
But concerning this subject is very easy to read about the imminent, fatal catastrophe that will inexorable fall upon all our heads if we don’t behave.
[now I really have to restrain myself from discussing what behave means, from defending the European social security system that the same guys that caused the crisis say is not possible to sustain, etc., etc. … again: this post is not about that!]
It is about what I call the anthropocentric character of all these opinions, i.e., the inability of the vast majority of the well educated opinion makers to remember (or, I suspect, in most cases to realize!) that our species (as has happened with all the others in our planet) within a very brief interval of geological time will almost for sure disappear.
What I mean is that all geologists know that Homo sapiens sapiens will briefly (in geological terms) most probably be extinct.
For those of you non-geologists who are less familiar with geological time, a very small list of dates to trigger your interest (this is a super super summarized list of important events):
- (most) Cosmologists say the Universe started with the Big Bang at 15 000 million years;
- The age of the Earth corresponds closely to one third of that time (4600 million years);
- The first forms of life (prokaryotes) are generally thought to have appeared on the Earth between 3000-4000 million years;
- Multicellular organisms did not exist until ca. 610 million years and;
- Modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens), biped apes with big brains that love to use instruments, are only around since 200 000 years (the lack of the word million after the number is not a mistake!).
If you’re not a geologist take a break to think about these numbers. Compare 200ky with 100My that corresponds approximately to the time of dominance of dinosaurs on the Earth. Take your time, think about it.
How do you feel? Getting a grip of how hugely insignificant we are in geological terms now? Take it easy we’re not extinct yet, and mean while I recommend the use of a small parcel of the time we have left to read the beautiful book by Jan Zalasiewicz “The Earth After Us – What legacy will humans leave in the rocks” (an offer from an aunt of mine that lives in Toronto, who has paid me a visit in Lisbon a few weeks ago).
(left) - Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz (photo from here)
The book uses, as an excuse to explain the geology of our planet, the premise of an intelligent alien civilization finding Earth one hundred million years from now – i.e. long after our extinction as a species - and their efforts to learn about our planet through reading its history on the rocks.
What impact would we have left? What impression would we have made? What would be our legacy in the eyes of these alien guys?
The book which was first published in 2008 (many of you might have read it already), is not a science fiction book; make no mistake about it. Although its main premise is speculative enough (alien civilization finding our planet, etc.), it functions merely as a pretext to explain with unbelievable simplicity some major concepts of modern geology.
How and why is an important parcel of the history of our planet preserved in the strata? How rare is this compared with other solar system planets? What is plate tectonics, and why does it exist on Earth, and not on Venus or Mars? What are the implications of this for the existence of life? These are all examples of interesting discussed topics, always contemplated with the concern of making sophisticated concepts accessible to everyone with a curious mind: one of the most productive ways to shake the depressive feeling arising from realizing our (nevertheless quite obvious) finitude as a species!
[Then again we are the product of thousands of millions of years of evolution. One strange product since in our case, through such an evolution, matter has acquired at least some degree of consciousness of itself, and of its surroundings. There is absolutely no precedent in the history of the Earth (and elsewhere in the Universe?). So maybe, just maybe, this will make a difference, and one hundred million years from now we will be exploring other stars. At least that’s what I like to think about it when I look at my kids]
