Went walking today through the nearby
woods. As I've been watching a Nova series on the evolution of life
as shown in Australia, I started thinking about deep time. Actually,
I started thinking about trees and green plants, as I was surrounded
by them. And about an image from that TV show showing what the first
land plants must have looked like 475 million years ago. The were
like simple, tiny mosses and lichens. In the time since, they've
become all the plants we see today.
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| Reconstruction of Cooksonia |
The earth – and solar system – are
some 4.6 billion years old. The age of the universe, according to
the latest information from the Planck satellite, is around 13.8
billion. The most simple forms of life on earth go back at least 2
billion years. The Ginko tree is 200 million years old. What do
these numbers mean to us? We have become used to reading about
hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars so we feel
comfortable, perhaps, with thinking of just a few billion here and
there. But look at a forest and think about the time it took to
make it what we see. Read anything about the latest discoveries of
our DNA and how the supposedly “junk” part actually helps
orchestrate a vast and complex dance of proteins that make us what we
are. Or about the complexity of the human brain, only a million or
so years old. How long did it take from the first stirrings of life
– tiny bits even without cell walls – to everything alive we see?
Each change taking countless generations of random mutation and
natural selection. Stare down that long hallway home and that is
deep time.
Go further back to that Big Bang of
13.8 billion years ago. At the first moment, everything was the same
burst of energy. Light didn't escape into space for over 300,000
years. But within the tiniest part of one second, the Higgs
Field manifested and gave form to the elementary particles of the
universe. Over the next billions of years, the energy and matter of
the universe cooled and condensed into atoms, molecules, stars,
galaxies and us. If we define life as that which exists and changes,
the universe has been alive since the beginning, evolving complexity
and becoming so many things. Look down that hallway, to the light at
the bedroom door and that is deep time.
