The Long View

Recently, a friend challenged me to avoid hiding away from the current state of affairs through taking the long view, which is my default setting. Better, she said, to look for ways to act. And yes, I can see some ways to do that, in the necessary circumstances. But the long view can really be very long. Things have been happening since the dawn of time and will happen for even longer. So, yes, why vex oneself. The comings and goings of our leaders, our nations, our species, will pass into the mists and Earth and life will persist even when we don’t.

Let’s review. The universe has been around for at least 13.7 billion years, with the first galaxies, stars and planets forming just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. Our sun formed 4.6 billion years ago and our planet 100 million years later. Life may have gotten under way not so long afterwards at 4.1-3.5 billion years ago. In all, there’s been plenty of time for all sorts of things to have happened. Civilizations elsewhere may have come and gone many times before.

But let’s stop a moment. One can talk about billions of years as if we could actually understand what that would be like. The physics and the chemistry of our cosmos permit, perhaps require, a process of physical and chemical evolution that populates existence with an ever-increasing degree of complexity, but one that takes immense stretches of time to work out. It took 50,000 years for regular matter particles to emerge from the radiation of energy following the Big Bang. According to the Standard Model, it took the universe 379,000 years to cool enough for electrons and protons to combine into atoms, mostly hydrogen. Even these cosmologically short sums of years are really beyond our comprehension.

The life that began that 4.1-3.5 billion years ago – perhaps at deep sea hydrothermal vents or shoreline tidal pools – manifested as self-reproducing complexes of simple chemical compounds, perhaps primitive RNA-like viruses. It took a very long gestation for these to give birth to single one-celled plants able to photosynthesize, around 1.75 billion years ago. Animal life – simple organisms unable to move but deriving nutrients directly from the water – took another billion years to arrive, some 600 million years ago.

While microbial life may have reached land 2.8 billion years ago, the surface was essentially barren until the first land fungi at 1.3 billion years, followed by plants a few hundred million years latter and, eventually, animals – most likely arthropods – some 530 million years ago. Life took off rather “quickly” after the Cambrian explosion of complex multi-cell life forms in the seas 560 million years ago. (David Attenborough did a wonderful two-part special on this period called First Life.) Again, all this took an unimaginably long, slow time. For millions of years, it would have seemed that nothing had changed, that nothing much was happening. (Although the earth may have gone through a global snowball glaciation along the way.)

For the last 600 million years, the earth and life continued to change. The continents moved around – coming together, splitting apart – and massive events occurred that wiped out most life, clearing the slate for new forms. The last of these extinctions, 66 million years ago, helped the mammals come to the fore. Primates may have first appeared as far back as 90 million years but it took around 70 million to reach the Hominid family – the great apes lineage to which humans belong – around 20 million years ago. Australopithecus apes arose 4 million years ago and it took another two million for Homo Erectus.

The first Neanderthals arose 600 thousand years ago and they lasted until just after meeting Homo Sapiens, around 550 thousand years later. Can we even grasp the reality of this human timescale in which Neanderthals – fully human they were – loved, lived, raised children, dreamed and mourned through thousands of generations in which each was like the last?

As for us, our species, coming along 300,000 years ago, experienced seemingly unchanging lives of hunting and gathering until just 12 thousand years ago and the discovery of agriculture. It took another 7,000 years for the first city, Uruk, to come into existence in Mesopotamia in 5400 BC (around the time the Great Basin bristlecone pines were germinating). Before the Greeks, from the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians to the Persians, 5000 years of recorded history unfolded dense with human life

So, the past – full of countless moments of change, life and death – is very, very long. And so will be the future. Seems that in 250 million years the continents will again crash into each other forming a new Pangea. The earth itself will endure another five billion years until the sun becomes a red giant and swallows our planet. (I won’t mention how many trillions of years until the heat death of the universe.) I wonder what the earth and its creatures will be like in a million years, in a billion years.

Meanwhile, we have our moment here and now. We are the stuff dreams are made on. Living the good life remains our timeless challenge.