Measuring time in unhuman terms

Climate change and its subsequent severe weather events are reshaping our world at a progressively faster pace, a series of calamities that may not much affect me, a homo sapiens stumbling through his eighth decade, but will likely have disastrous consequences for the generations of humans that follow. Increasingly violent tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, tropical storm surges, tornadoes, derechos, floods, droughts, heat domes, wildfires, rising sea levels and other man-made “natural” disasters of this Anthropocene Age will reconfigure the world that once nurtured humankind and that we have despoiled over the course of the past 12,000 years.

Try as I might, this expanse of time – although just a blink of the eye in the Earth’s 3,000,000,000 years of existence – is impossible for me to grasp. Twelve thousand years would be almost 50,000 changes of the seasons through spring, summer, fall, winter. One hundred fifty lifetimes for me. Four hundred generations of my family’s lineage. Twice as long as all of civilization has existed. Abstractions of time beyond my conception.

To comprehend that time frame, I had to switch my camera to the panoramic clock setting, back up a few steps beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto, look through the view finder from a perspective outside the Solar System, slow my thoughts into a Zen state of serenity, and blank my mind to dismiss the relevance of going to tonight’s baseball game. With the help of Carl Linnaeus [1], Gregor Mendel [2], Charles Darwin [3], and Alfred Russel Wallace [4] and their scientific theories of ordering of the species (taxonomy), Mendelian inheritance (genetics), and species evolution, I achieved my goal of calculated and calibrated time travel.

You see, I wanted a glimpse of how the Earth’s life forms, the full spectrum of the species of the plant and animal kingdoms, would gradually change to survive in this reconfigured future world. Not homo sapiens, of course, because we will have exterminated ourselves, we creatures unable to survive and reproduce in the degraded environment of the near future. Rotten luck. But some, perhaps many, of the 8 to 9 million species of plants and animals on Earth will pass through the cataclysmic portal of the Earth’s next and fast-approaching Sixth Great Extinction Event.

There have been five of these events previously: the Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, the Late Devonian Extinction, the Permian-Triassic Extinction, the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction. Each caused a huge decrease in the number of species. But life on our fecund Earth went forward, and the world was eventually repopulated by millions of new species. As a reference point for the age of the world, note that a billion years ago, not one single species of plant or animal now living on the Earth existed. A billion years in the future, not one single plant or animal now living on the Earth will exist. But even a period of 50,000 or 100,000 years could be enough for the world to rebound from its horrendous relationship with homo sapiens.

Looking through the panoramic time-lens of my clock-camera, I began to think of our current concept of the ordering of the species (taxonomy) as a static photograph which was printed by Linnaeus, taken by Mendel using grainy 35mm film, lighted by the strobe of Darwin and Wallace, a snapshot of 300 years shutter speed illuminated by a single flash. We see only a frozen frame in the ongoing evolutionary whirl of life. But species morphology is not a snapshot. It is an endless motion picture, its reel of film infrequently breaking and interrupted, slowly revealing the changes of the plant and animal kingdoms through millions of years.

This motion picture of life on Earth is patient and persevering; it reveals how old species disappear and new species emerge and go on to thrive in transmuted environments. Do not doubt that the Earth will recover from our human-caused Sixth Great Extinction Event and move on in a new incarnation. We will not be part of that transformation. We have already chosen not to be.

[1] Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the “father of modern taxonomy.” In the 1740s, he journeyed through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, while publishing several volumes. By the time of his death, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe.

[2] Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) established the basic principles of heredity and is known as the father of the science of genetics. Through his experiments with plants, he discovered that traits are passed from parents to offspring through discrete units, now known as genes. He formulated laws of inheritance, including the law of segregation, the law of dominance, and the law of independent assortment.

[3] Charles Robert Darwin (1809-82) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept. In a joint presentation with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history.

[4] Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic, spurring Darwin to published in in1859 his work titled “On the Origin of Species.” Wallace was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species, and is sometimes called the father of zoogeography.

(Bios edited from text on Wikipedia)