My A-level Geology teacher was a charming sort of fellow. He delighted in letting us know just how insignificant the human race is. “If the age of the Earth was one week.” he used to say, pacing up and down the room like some demented hall monitor “humans have only been around for 33 minutes.”
Now I’ve been doing some digging, and it turns out he may be right. If the age of the Earth is 4.6 billion as most scientists believe it is, and if humans have been around for 200,000 of those years (again as those scientists would have you believe) then we’ve only been alive for just over 4% of the Earth’s lifetime.
Does that make anyone else feel a little bit unimportant? Doesn’t it make you ponder the enormity of it all? No? Let me try a bit harder, then.
Think of you, sitting at your computer or iPad or whatever reading this. Now think about the person closest to you how far you are away from then. Now think about all of the people on your street, and how well you might know some of them. What about all the people in your country? How well do you know all of them? And finally, imagine everyone on the planet, and try to think of the enormous improbability of you meeting every one of them.
And just for an encore, imagine the entire, expanding universe, and how ultimately you fit into it.
A bit humbling isn’t it? Teachers and people whose jobs it is to empower and motivate us like to tell us that we’re all cogs in the ever-moving machine of the universe. But thinking about it, we’re not even cogs. We’re not even the dust on the cogs. If anything, we’re the stuff that settles on the dust of the cogs of the machine of the universe. And that’s a bit of a sore point, really.
Us humans like to think that we’re, well, a bit important. We build monuments to our heroes, and we destroy our enemies. We wallow about in our own self-importance, convinced that whatever might come our way we can deal with it. But the reality is that in the grand scheme of things, we’re probably about as significant as a single atom floating in the cosmos.
And now that you’re all sufficiently depressed about the crushing enormity of existence, let’s think of a few reasons why the human race should be proud of itself after all.
Here’s one, art. Here’s another, music. And here’s one more, the written word. The human race has so many reasons to be proud of itself, more than we could ever name on a single website. No other creature that we know of can exist in such a diverse range of terrains, and thrive in such numbers. Humans are the only creatures to look at the world around them and try to improve it. We are grafters, we are builders, we are movers and shakers. We take stock of the horizon and seek to walk beyond it. We are gods of our own making.
Yes, the universe is absolutely enormous. And yes, there is probably life and intellects out there far superior to our own. But until we find them, it’s all right to be proud of our little corner of the galaxy.
So yes, if you’re inclined to believe the ramblings of disgruntled geology teachers, we may have only been born 33 minutes ago. But, when you think about it, it’s been a hell of a half hour.
By Darren Moss