IIn our daily lives, time is a precious commodity. We can win or lose. We can save, spend or waste. If our crimes are revealed, we run the risk of having to to do time.
For scientists, time is something we can measure. Clocks have, over the centuries, been the high-tech artefacts of their time – the water clock, the pendulum clock, the Harrison chronometer, and so on, right up to the incredible precision of atomic clocks – marvels of technology. modern, although without the obvious aesthetic quality of more traditional watches. (Although engineering friends tell me that, viewed through a microscope, there is beauty in the intricacies of a silicon chip.)
Before there was a reliable calendar – or any records, or artifacts that could be reliably dated – the past was a “fog.” But this has not stopped efforts to impose precise and fanciful chronologies. The most accurate of all was that drawn up by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, according to which the world began at 6 pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. Until 1910, bibles published by Oxford University Press displayed Ussher’s chronology alongside the text.
Even in the 17th century, Ussher’s estimates encountered problems. Jesuit missionaries returned from China, recounting detailed historical records dating back to dynasties before 2,350 BC—the proclaimed date of Noah’s Flood. Many were skeptical that the entire history of Earth’s mountains, rivers, and fauna could be compressed into 6,000 years. . Sir Isaac Newton, in his old age, abandoned science and was obsessed with completing his own ‘Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms’. He did not dispute Ussher’s dating of human origins, but conjectured that the six ‘days’ of Genesis could each be an extended era.
In the 19th century, Darwin’s genius was to recognize how “natural selection of favored variations” could have transformed primordial life into the astonishing varieties of creatures, now mostly extinct, that crawled, swam or flew on Earth. But this emergence – a disorderly process that proceeds without any guidance – is inherently very slow. Darwin guessed that evolution required not just millions, but hundreds of millions of years. He was attentive to supporting evidence from geology. He estimated, through an argument that was actually flawed (and which he cut from later editions of his book), that it took 300 million years to carve the Weald of Kent. If he had seen the Grand Canyon, he might have made a more convincing estimate.
Accurate radioactive dating now tells us that the Sun and its planets condensed 4.55 billion years ago from interstellar gas in the Milky Way – itself a galaxy that, along with billions of others, is part of an even larger cosmos. vast that emerged from a fiery “beginning”. “about 13.8 billion years ago. Increasingly rich data from giant telescopes has allowed cosmologists to develop a credible picture of our expanding Universe. The time graph can be safely extrapolated to a time when everything was so dense as an atomic nucleus. At that time, the universe had been expanding for just a millisecond. But that first millisecond—when crucial features of the universe were established—is still mysterious and speculative; in a laboratory and therefore lose our position in experimentally tested physics
And what happened ‘before the beginning’? On this fundamental question, we can’t do much better than St. Augustine in the 5th century. He sidestepped the question by arguing that time itself was created with the universe. Some modern cosmologists say that time closes in on itself, and the question is like asking: what happens if you go north from the North Pole? The “genesis event” remains, in a way, as mysterious for us as it was for Saint Augustine.
Therefore, we now believe that cosmic history spans billions of years. Our time horizons have extended enormously into the past. But our concept of the future has expanded even further. For our 17th century ancestors, history was coming to an end. Sir Thomas Browne wrote: “The world itself seems to be in decline. A greater part of time is turning than is to come.”
But that hardly seems credible to an astronomer – in fact, we’re probably still closer to the beginning than the end. Our Sun is less than half its life away; It will shine for another 6 billion years before its nuclear fuel runs out. It then explodes, swallowing the inner planets. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps forever – to become increasingly colder and increasingly empty. To quote Woody Allen, eternity is too long, especially at the end.
The traditional view, even among those who accept Darwinian evolution, is that we humans are necessarily the apex of the evolutionary tree. But from the perspective of a vastly prolonged cosmic future, it is more reasonable to conjecture that we have not yet reached the halfway point in the progressive emergence of complexity in the cosmos. Any creatures that witness the death of the sun (having long before developed the technology to escape to a safe distance) may be as different from us as we are from the slime mold.
But even in the immensely concerted timescape that modern cosmology reveals, stretching billions of years into the future and past, this century is special. It is the first in 45 million centuries of Earth’s history in which one species, ours, can determine the fate of the entire planet. We have entered what is sometimes called the “anthropocene.” Humans’ collective “footprint” on Earth is heavier than ever; Today’s decisions about the environment and energy, strengthened by our scientific knowledge, will reverberate centuries ahead and determine the fate of the entire biosphere and how future generations will live.
Despite our awareness of the eons ahead, our planning horizons have shrunk because our lives are changing so quickly. The political focus is on the urgent and immediate and on the next elections. Medieval cathedrals took a century or more to complete. There is little effort by the public or private sectors to plan more than two or three decades in advance – or to build structures that, as cathedrals did, provide inspiration for a millennium.
Even more crucial is the possibility of human beings acquiring the ability to redesign or “improve” themselves through genetic modification; or implement “cybernetic” techniques that allow them to implant the advantages of electronic computers in their offspring. This evolution through “secular intelligent design” could operate more quickly than Darwinian selection.
Perhaps our remote descendants have much longer life expectancies; they can even become almost immortal. Such entities, whose mental powers and attitudes are beyond our reach – perhaps even beyond our imagination, would certainly not feel “prisoners of time” like us mortals. Would they, like us, “spend it and save it” as a scarce resource? Or would too much abundance lead to boredom? Only time can tell.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
