Michael BurnsHon 301.S01Surviving the Anthropocene: Prof. Eduardo Mendieta and Prof. Frederick WalterPut the length of time human beings have roamed the planet into perspective. How old is Earth? When did life appear? How do you comprehend large numbers?

At this very moment you may be under the impression that you are sitting still, static, immobile. In fact, there are a number of ways to define a standard of rest, a reference point from which to measure motion. Earths tangential velocity is over 1000 miles per hour. The sun and earth are traveling at 43,000 miles per hour towards the constellation Lyra. The sun circles the Milky Way Galaxy at the jaw dropping speed of 483,000 miles per hour. Theory suggests the Big Bang created cosmic background radiation, the measurement of which indicates the Milky Way Galaxy is traveling through space at 1.3 million miles per hour towards an unknown concentration of matter sometimes called the Great Attractor (Fraknoi).Imagine stepping into an F-35 Lightening II multirole fighter jet, Lockheed Martins 100+ million dollar contribution to militarized aviation. Considered by many to be the best 5th generation fighter aircraft in history, the F-35 Lightning II boasts, advanced stealth, integrated avionics, sensor fusion and superior logistics support, multi-spectral sensors, interoperability, and modernized avionics (Global Security). Now unless youre a fighter pilot (odds are 1 in about 20,000) you probably wouldnt try to take off and fly. Without thorough knowledge of the plane - the way it moves and acts, the way it keeps you safe and headed in a sound direction - most people would consider it reckless, ignorant, and dangerous to attempt flight. But it turns out that we are traveling exponentially faster than the F-35s top speed, on a vehicle of inordinately greater size: our earth. Additionally, this planet is infinitely more complex, dynamic, and unpredictable than any aircraft. This realization is one great motivating factor to dig deeper, and look harder, for a thorough understanding of our planets nature and history. We raise the questions, How old is Earth? and, When did life appear? Because through an understanding of where we came from, we can make predictions about where we are going.The twentieth century hosted an accumulation of evidence to support what was later referred to as the Big Bang Theory. This theory explained observations of entropy in the universe, and it explained why gravity hasnt pulled everything into one conglomerate. Olbers paradox suggests that the universe cant be infinite and eternal because of the darkness of the night sky. This paradox is also undermined by the Big Bang Theory, which describes a universe that is finite in time and space. Before the Big Bang, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists theorize without consensus over the existence of time, the quality and nature of nothingness, and the existence of a maker. But it is widely accepted that, eventually, a single infinitesimally small point expanded into our observable universe, in what is in what as referred to as the big bang. Before this event, there is no consensus as to what existed (if anything) for how long (if time existed), and where (if space existed). After this event, however, there is a sizable amount of scientific evidence that allows for an intelligible and articulate history of our observable universe. This places the Big Bang, the beginning of everything, 13 billion years ago (Christian 17-20). The earth, however, did not exist until much later. Radiometric dating has been used to compile a wealth of date describing the ages of earth rocks, moon rocks, and meteorites. The United States Geological Survey, a US government agency describes the most accurate way to predict the age of the earth using geology: The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of lead-207 to lead-206 changes over time owing to the decay of radioactive uranium-235 and uranium-238, respectively (Darymple). These techniques indicate that the best estimate for the age of the earth is 4.54 billion years.The earth 4.54 billion years ago was sterile. According to the BBC Nature timeline, life did not arise until 3.8 billion years ago in the form of prokaryotic cells, like bacteria. At this time, there were no continents on earth, but countless islands in a shallow ocean. Carbon dioxide levels were significantly higher and the sun was but a fraction of the intensity it is today. Then, more than a billion years later, multicellular life evolved. But it wasnt until 0.2 million years ago that our species, Homo sapiens, was born. It was during the Pleistocene epoch, a period of extensive glaciation, cool temperatures, and dry air. It is hypothesized that dust storms occurred frequently because of the prominence of desserts and the weathering of rocks into sand and dust through the process of glaciation. Our species endured into the Holocene epoch and now survives, and even defines, the Anthropocene. So far, the points on a timeline have been established numerically for an absolute understanding of the time in which: the universe began, earth was formed, life emerged, and humans evolved. We can identify the numbers and come to basic conclusions like, A billion years is 1000 times longer than a million years, but it is easy to become lost in a sea of prefix conversions, decimal places, and counted zeros. 13 billion years sounds like forever...but then, 4.54 billion years sounds like forever too, because to humans, life is measured in minutes and hours. It is rare that we contemplate years. And when we do, we contemplate decades, or perhaps even centuries when studying colonial history. It is tremendously difficult to fathom the length of 4.54 billion years. The introduction to my 10th grade history textbook began with the Big Bang Theory, and then described the formation of earth and the evolution of life. But only a few pages later, the reader was looking at cave paintings done by humans in the Lascaux caves of France. Of course, its not the authors job to place millions of blank pages in the textbook between the Big Bang and the age of man; the proper timeline was almost certainly provided, but the fact remains, even using timelines, analogies, and comparisons, billions of years will remain illusive to man in nature, duration, meaning, and scope. Our understanding will always be relative to durations we can experience. If a friend remarked over the phone, Ill be there in five minutes, most people would have an innate understanding of how long they would be required to wait. Its unlikely anyone would say, Oh, thats the duration of one minute, times five, or, Oh, thats the duration of one hour divided by twenty. Minutes and hours can be understood without comparison or relation to other durations. Greater durations are not so easy to keep track of. It is common in Hollywood films to see the days tallied on an inmates cell wall or scratched into the beam of a desert island survivors makeshift shelter. Minutes and hours can be understood quantitatively and qualitatively, and even without the rising and setting of the sun, it is likely that most people would have a general idea of how long a 24 hour day should last. But the tally marks in Hollywood imply that timescales greater than a day are difficult to measure using only our internal clock. Tallying the days is just an example of a makeshift calendar but more importantly it implies an important technique that humans use to gauge time durations over 24 hours. Put simply, we multiply. The question is raised: If we have experienced seconds, minutes, hours, days months and years, why is it that we can only gauge seconds, minutes, and hours accurately? Dan Falk of Smithsonian Magazine offers interesting incite in his article Do Humans Have a Biological Stopwatch? Falk explains, A leading theory is that we are endowed with the biological equivalent of a stopwatch: Somehow the brain emits a steady stream of pulses and subconsciously tallies how many were produced during a specific intervalmaybe 100 pulses in your brain equals one minute. Unfortunately, its not understood how these pulses are tallied, or where, and on top of that, studies show that emotional responses affect our perception of time duration. Additionally, our brains have multiple running tallies at the same time, for measuring the duration of different tasks (Falk). The way our biological stopwatch, or internal clock, works might offer some incite into why seconds minutes and hours are easier to gauge than days months and years. Falk describes a task-oriented biological stopwatch one that is warped by emotions and altered by new observations. The stopwatch he describes does not sound effective in measuring time durations that last longer than would a task. The word task is defined loosely but we can assume most tasks take seconds minutes or hours, like making coffee, walking the dog, or driving to work. Perhaps we have a hard time judging longer durations because our biological stopwatch developed evolutionarily, solely to measure task-scale durations. The warping of our time perceptions in between tasks, under the influence of emotional triggers, would make longer time perceptions difficult to gauge and remember. Perhaps this is why we conceive longer durations as comparative functions of shorter durations. We use logic and extrapolation to expand the bounds of our primitive biological clocks. This is best demonstrated by an example: The earth is 4.54 billion years old and our species evolved 200,000 years ago. These timescales are entirely unfathomable to us. They are many powers greater than any length of time our biological stopwatches might know and appreciate. In fact, even if the science behind our brains calculation of time is still foggy, its impossible for anyone to argue that they can fully grasp such a length of time. Nobody on earth has ever come close to enduring that long. But by creating an analogy or a visualization tool using timescales that we know and appreciate, we can form a better understanding of our species minute chapter in the earths history. The following is a clock a very common time-visualization tool. This clock places a 24-hour day in proportion to the earths 4.54 billion year existence. Fig.1BrightmoreThe earth was formed at midnight or 12:00am and life originated fairly early in the day, at 9:18am. But it was not until the last hour of the day, after 11:00pm that an enormous blossoming of complex multicellular life came into being. And then, at 11:59:58, in approximately the last two seconds of the day, the first modern man was born (Brightmore). This clock tool is surprisingly effective in giving us a sense of how small the span of our existence has been on this planet. It allows us to use seconds, minutes, and hours, periods that we can gauge the length of confidently, to develop a relative understanding of our duration on earth. Unfortunately our understanding of great lengths of time can only be understood relatively, using analogy and scaling. Even the brightest minds struggle to conceptualize large numbers. This is humorously demonstrated in Carl Sagans YouTube video on the googol and the googolplex, or ten to the one hundred, and ten to the power of a googol respectively. Carl Sagan explains that he has begun to write out a googolplex on a roll of toilet paper. Beginning with the number one followed by zero after zero, Carl Sagan unrolls the toilet paper out of the room, through the door and onto the patio when he stops and informs the viewer that efforts to write out this number on paper are futile. A piece of paper large enough to contain all the zeros in a googolplex couldnt be stuffed into the known universe! (Sagan). The mere image of a renowned astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, and astrobiologist - laughing at his own futility - is evidence enough that some numbers are simply too large for anyone to truly comprehend. In fact even Sagan resorted to a spatial analogy to describe the scope of the googolplex.The googolplex is fantastically larger than anything in the scale of earth years, but the fact remains: humans will continue to grasp at an understanding of large numbers and our perceptions of time in the millions and billions of years will continue to be understood in terms of proportions, comparisons, visual aids, and analogy.

Works CitedBrightmore, Jamie. "DEEP TIME." Deep Time : A History of the Earth. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015.Christian, David. "The Inanimate Universe." Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: U of California, 2004. N. pag. Print.Dalrymple, G. Brent. The Age of the Earth. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1991. Print."F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) Lightning II." Global Security. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015.Falk, Dan. "Do Humans Have a Biological Stopwatch?" Smithsonian. N.p., n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015.Fraknoi, Andrew. "ASP: How Fast Are You Moving When You Are Sitting Still?" Universe in the Classroom. Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2007. Web. 09 Mar. 2015."Googol and Googolplex by Carl Sagan." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2015."History of Life on Earth." BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2015.