Geology’s Most Frightening Fact

Thomas Browne wrote a beautiful epigram of the old, comforting view of time in his Religio Medici in the mid-seventeenth century: “Time we may comprehend. ‘Tis but five days elder than ourselves.” Contrast this with James Hutton in volume one of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Time has “No vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.” Time cycles through endless amounts.

Geology discovered that time comes not in thousands, but in millions and billions, of years. That in itself is not necessarily a threat to human views of our own intrinsic importance. What is a threat is that time comes in millions and billions of years—and human history is restricted to the last millimicrosecond. If human history pervaded all those millions and billions, then you could still say that we were intrinsic and predictable. But that’s not so. Time comes in billions, and we come only at the very end. We occupy such a tiny amount of the total structure of time that pedagogues throughout the world can only discuss it in metaphor, so that we talk about the last inch of the cosmic mile or the last minute of the cosmic year. The great American writer John McPhee put it this way: consider the history of the Earth to be as long as the old measure of the English yard, which is the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched finger. One stroke of a nail file on the third finger would wipe out human history.

That’s frightening because it forces one to come to grips with the terrible consequence that maybe we were not destined to be. Maybe we really are a cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on this tangled tree of life, a little side branch that would never appear again if history were to run again.

This is geology’s most frightening fact, and I think it is a primary reason that we feel impelled to tell the story of life’s history as a tale of predictable progress leading up to us. We want to say, “Yes, we’re the last millimicrosecond, but everything that came before is predictably preparatory for the necessary and eventual appearance of human beings, and it doesn’t matter that we’re the last millimicrosecond because everything’s part of the same story and must go in that direction.”

The best argument against that was presented not by a scientist but by America’s greatest humorist, Mark Twain, who saw clearly, as he usually did, and who wrote late in the last century, when the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure: “Man has been here thirty-two thousand years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for.”

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Stephen Jay Gould wrote a ridiculous amount of brilliant stuff. Wouldn’t it be handy to just chat with Gould for a while, and have him summarize some of his big ideas? Boom: The Individual in Darwin’s World. This slim book simply records Gould’s brief “Second Edinburgh Medal Address.”

But as Gould warns inside the cover, “written and spoken English are different languages, and that the latter does not translate well into the former.” And the book has some typographical quirks to boot. So above I polished what you can read in its original form below:

…what I like to call geology’s most frightening fact. Geology discovered that time comes not in thousands but in millions and billions of years. That in itself is not necessarily a threat to human views of our own intrinsic importance. Thomas Browne in his ‘Religio Medici’ in the mid-seventeenth century wrote a beautiful epigram of the older, comforting view: ‘Time we may comprehend. ‘Tis but five days elder than ourselves.’ which is a comforting view. Then comes along James Hutton in volume one of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and there’s ‘No vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end’: time cycles through endless amounts. Now that’s not in itself a threat. What is a threat is that time comes in millions and billions of years and human history is restricted to the last millimicrosecond. If human history still pervaded all those millions and billions you could say that we were intrinsic and predictable. But that’s not so. Time comes in billions and we’re at the very end. We occupy such a tiny amount of the total structure of time that pedagogues throughout the world can only discuss it in metaphor, so that we talk about the last inch of the cosmic mile or the last minute of the cosmic year. My favourite metaphor is by the great American writer John McPhee; it says: consider the history of the Earth to be as long as the old measure of the English yard which is the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched finger, and as McPhee says, one stroke of a nail file on the third finger would wipe out human history.

Now that’s frightening because the very existence of that fact forces one to come to grips with the terrible consequence, which I think is quite true, that maybe we were not destined to be. Maybe we really are a cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on this arborescent tree of life, a little side branch that would never appear again if we run the tape again. This is geology’s frightening fact and I think it is the main reason from the geological standpoint why we feel impelled to tell the story of life’s history as a tale of predictable progress leading up to us. We can say, ‘Yes, we’re the last millimicrosecond, but everything that came before is predictably preparatory for the necessary and eventual appearance of human beings, and it but doesn’t matter that we’re the last millimicrosecond because everything’s part of the same story and must go in that direction’.

Now the best argument against that was presented not by a scientist but by America’s greatest humorist, Mark Twain, who saw clearly, as he usually did, and who wrote late in the last century, when the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure: ‘Man has been here thirty-two thousand years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for.’