Geologic time--can us ordinary humans really "get it?"

[raccoon]

I wonder if anyone, even paleontologists and geologists, can really comprehend geologic time.

I was listening to a paleontology lecture last night, and he got into talking about deep time. He used the analogy of a year—you’ve probably heard a version of that one—here’s two:

http://www.smithlifescience.com/GeologicTimeComparisons.htm
http://www.uky.edu/KGS/education/geologictimescale.pdf

He also used the example of, estimating 23 years to a generation, in 7 million years there would be 300,000 generations.

But I still can’t really “get” it—and I wonder if anyone does. Just like when you’re talking about enormous sums of money, it just doesn’t register.

[snooper2]

1. If religion didn't exist it would probably be easier for the masses...

Outside of that, time on Earth since it's beginning is pretty easy to understand.

Imagining what happened within the first 5 seconds, then, the first 5 minutes after the big bang gets a little hard to wrap your mind around

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. Never mind the 1st 5 seconds, what about the 1st 10-31 seconds?

In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation is the expansion of space in the early universe at a rate much faster than the speed of light. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds. Following the inflationary period, the universe continues to expand, but at a slower rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_%28cosmology%29

So that's a universe with fundamentally different things happening, in the first million trillion trillionth of a second. But that was over 10 billion years ago.

[safeinOhio]

2. Never loan money to a geologist.

They have a different concept of time.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

4. Laugh!

I can't believe I never heard that one! (Did a bachelor's and a PhD in geology Didn't stay in the field, though, so I won't be able to pass it along to anyone.

[Kurska]

3. Humans just aren't capable of really understanding such numbers.

They are completely outside of the realm of our everyday existence.

I guess it strikes to the heart of "can you really understand completely, that which you have never experience?".

[The2ndWheel]

5. Our version of time is very human centric

Sun centric. A day is one rotation of the planet. A year is once around the sun. Well, how far does that get you?

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. From our perspective of time. Which probably doesn't mean much if you're sitting outside the galaxy somewhere.

We've tried to measure time, label time. We've also taken it upon ourselves to call a horse a horse, even though it's not really a horse of course.

I would say we can't "get it", as there's nothing to get, which is why we've attempted to control it, because we can't understand it.

[Aristus]

6. The Australian native people might be able to.

As possibly the oldest still existing culture on Earth (some estimates have aboriginal culture going back 35,000 years!...), they can appreciate numbers that can't quite fit in the human head.

They have a term, Dream Time, that refers either to a time period parallel to our own in which the gods exist, or to a time so far back, there's really only a dim, hazy race-memory of it.

[frogmarch]

7. Putting Time In Perspective

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html

A "prettier" graphic:

http://visual.ly/perspective-time?utm_campaign=website&utm_source=sendgrid.com&utm_medium=email

Geologic time is hard to grasp. It blows my mind.

[raccoon]

8. Thanks for the links. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. I have...but it took me many decades to be honest

I guess watching cosmos when I was a teen, and the cosmic clock...

Why I consider my time on earth, and it have heard this from geologists too, pretty insignificant. I also know that while SoCal is due to a major (read 8.0 or above) quake, since we are talking geologic time I will likely miss it, but be ready for it.

My time in earth is such a minuscule span in these wider expanse of time, that quite brutally honest there is no measurement for it.

Those crazy amounts of money, on the other hand, I have sort of a concept, but that is because I work with state and local budgets. They are actually available. So starting to wrap my mind around them, though I am no expert.

[Brother Buzz]

21. Watching Cosmos as a teen, and now Cosmos redux, and you still think this is a photograph....

taken by a deep space satellite? If one stopped and thought about time and distance, one would wonder how they get a camera 100,000 light years out there, and then get the image back.



http://sync.democraticunderground.com/10024594344
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4605617

[Romulox]

10. What difference does my "getting it" make?

[nadinbrzezinski]

11. It is quite humbling

Actually.

[Romulox]

12. No more so than the enormity of space. Or the microcosm of life in a drop of water.

Existence is as indescribable and unimaginable right now as it will be in some impossibly distant future...

[nadinbrzezinski]

14. Correct. I find science both amazing and humbling

But if you are into cosmology, I think of geologic time as it's little brother.

[seveneyes]

13. There is no time for infinity

[hack89]

15. High school seniors two weeks before graduation understand it just fine. nt

[DreamGypsy]

16. Start small...and it becomes easier to comprehend large numbers.

Try something easy, like 10. You can count to 10 in a single breath, something like 3 seconds. Counting to a 100 is under a minute, but probably requires a couple breaths (at least for me). Larger numbers are harder to actually count, since you need to "say" words like two hundred forty seven thousand six hundred and seventy eight - but just imagine you could "say" any number in a second. Modern computers can perform hundreds of trillions of operations per second, so it's not too hard to imagine that the human brain can add 1 to a previously computed number and 'say' the result.

Now, counting 300,000 generations of hominin ancestors is now pretty easy - takes just 83.3333 hours. Or you could restrict the count to genus Homo and only have to count to 85,714, under a day (23.4444 hours). Note, the generation times for bacteria (in the lab) can be as little as 12 minutes, so 300,000 generations could actually happen in ~7 years.

Lots of people are lucky enough to live a billion seconds - that's 32 years, 249 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes and 40 seconds. So, one can conceive (I think) of counting to a billion or a couple billion. Yeah, you have to figure in some downtime for eating, sleeping, and stuff like that, but at least it's imaginable.

The earth is estimated at 4.54 billion years old, so 148.38 years are required to count its age. The oldest authenticated human lived 122 years, 164 days. And the universe, 14.77 billion years, 482.71 years to count it. So, the counting methods starts to break down.

31,682 years to count to a trillion, so grasping the ~trillion solar neutrinos that pass through our bodies every second is difficult to "get". And the ~100 trillion cells in our bodies, 90 trillion being bacteria....whew.

[Arugula Latte]

17. It's hard to grasp, but it does show the ridiculousness of religion's emphasis on the last 2,000 yrs

It's so moronically myopic. The past two millennium have been a blip of a blip of a blip of the vast span of time.

[LanternWaste]

18. On an academic level I can recognize the numbers as such, but on a personal level...

On an academic level I can recognize the numbers as such, but on a personal level it's really rather difficult for me to penetrate the true depths of such large sums.

[theHandpuppet]

20. No more than I can comprehend the scale of the universe

Truly.