Viewing preparations for the U.S. launch of astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to rendevous with the ISS brought to mind the Apollo missions followed by the Space Shuttle era….all of which put our beautiful Earth into a new perspective in its orbit in the black of space.
I still wonder at how, to our human eye, the light of stars is a message from a world as it existed light years in our past, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it” (Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land). Robert Macfarlane (Underland) shared his witnessing of a glacier’s collapse, thrusting skyscrapers of ice up from deep below its surface , carrying within its ancient structure frozen air bubbles over 3000 years old. The oldest glacial ice in Greenland and Antarctica may approach 100 thousand to 1 million years old! What secrets, what memories preserved from deep time, what warnings might they carry?!
The concept of ‘Deep Time’ originated with 18th century geologist James Hutton. The earth we inhabit formed 4.5-4.6 billion years ago, the earliest homo species 2-3 million years ago, and modern humans as we know them less than 200,000 years ago. Deep Time is not time by the clock as we know it. It is the as yet unknowable “before and after” ocean of eons in which the “age of humans on earth” swims, in which astronomy, geology, and evolution make their explorations. “Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years….will, with nearly equal effect, awe the imagination.”(1)
Humans have such a limited view with our hours and days, weeks, months and years. Yet the decisions we make, the actions we are taking as a species on this planet are having profound effects on its future beyond our lifetimes or even the lifetime of our species: energy, climate, ecosystems, pollution, habitat. “For someone whose life expectancy is usually less than 100 years, it’s nearly impossible to imagine something so vast as geological or deep time….We’re a species that has trouble planning for our retirement, never mind what’s going to happen thousands of years down the road. Considering our brief amount of time on Earth, no other species has had such an impact on the way the Earth is moving forward.” (2)
Modern industrial cultures do not appear to have much reverence for ancestors or their connection with us; our concepts of “forward progression” seem to discount the value of context, the interconnectedness in which we live with all the worlds around and within, before and after us. The cosmos beyond our planet and the ancient core deep within it are our ancestors as much as the humans who have gone before. “Are we going to be good ancestors?”(3) As we become part of the deep time of the future, what teachings will we leave behind for generations down the road to uncover, what world will they inherit from us?
(1) 1981, John McPhee, Pulitzer-winning writer
(3) Jonas Salk, medical researcher and virologist
(2) J.D. Talasek, Nat’l Academy of Sciences
