ONE BILLION YEARS

A scientific report has stated that life as we know it will no longer exist on the Earth in about one billion years. A few microbes may hang on, lurking next to the last few remaining water droplets but in about 2.8 billion years, even those will have been extinguished and planet Earth will be just another dead rock hanging in space and waiting to be consumed by an exploding star.

That kind of makes you think, doesn't it...? No matter what you decide to get up and do today, no matter what you or your descendants achieve, what art or science or other philosophy you come up with, no matter what battles you fight and win or lose, or what piece of land you plant a flag on and claim in the name of another piece of land, one day it will all be reduced to nothing more meaningful than the race memory of a few rats or cockroaches for a while, before being forgotten as anything other than a sliver of strata in a lump of rock and eventually being blown to atoms by an exploding star anyway.

Hmm... It makes me look at all of the recycling and ask myself (slightly wickedly) whether it's worth all the bother...

On the other hand, you could argue that atoms are exactly what we came from, so that returning to that condition is just returning to our most natural state anyway and all of the atoms in you, me and that goldfish bowl in the corner that's crying out for its water to be changed have already been transformed many times, and will be again, and it's all just part of the great big cycle of life in an expanding universe.

The trickier bit to get a handle upon, of course, is consciousness, or this thing we like to think of as life. This precious something that means that we can interact, talk, care and do all of the other things that we do as living, breathing entities (including, unfortunately all of the killing off of other living, breathing entities that some of our fellow entities seem prone towards doing) and which we can't perceive of an inanimate object like a teapot doing, as far as we know.

Of course, in far less time than that billion years that they're going on about (although you wonder why they bothered, given what it ultimately told them about the sheer pointlessness of everything), in fact in maybe only 250 Million years, all of the continents that we currently recognise will most probably have smashed together and recombined into another supercontinent not dissimilar to the long-lost Pangaea, and everything we recognise of the Earth as it is now and has been for most of humanity's existence will be lost. Chewed up and swallowed by the very earth itself apart from perhaps a slightly grubby layer in the fossil record. 

Of course, if you think about it, even one million years might be a stretch for humanity and all of its works. After all, we've not even been here that long as yet, and only one thousand years ago most of the members of humanity were still living in mud and straw and hitting each other with bits of metal and claiming that it was in the name of civilisation.

The greatest achievements of our most successful but already long-lost civilisations are already crumbling to dust after only about four thousand years, so that anything we do is unlikely to survive that long, especially if whatever comes along to replace us doesn't know how to access the remnants of what was once the internet and find out what we all reckoned about everything.

So...

One billion years and all of our hopes, dreams and aspirations will have come to nothing in exactly the same way as everyone else's.

Better get on with it then, I suppose...

CRUMBLING

You might not have noticed the news story when it broke recently (well, it’s getting on for a good few weeks ago by now, given how long it takes me to get around to writing about these things), but a huge chunk of the white cliffs of Dover fell off the other day and landed as a huge pile of chalk on the stony beach below, thankfully without hurting anyone, although how they know that without shifting the stuff is anyone’s guess, I suppose.

They said it was due to the water getting in the cracks, freezing and expanding, as water does, and then causing the rock to crack open like an iceberg calving off a glacier, and with just as much of a crash, but with slightly less buoyancy, so instead of floating and bobbing off into the ocean to melt whilst frightening anyone in the shipping lanes, the fallen rock just lay there waiting to erode or perhaps be opportunistically picked up for the snooker and pub darts industries, seeing as very few of the other outlets for chalk seem to need all that much of it in these “post-blackboard” days…

There might be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover one day, but they’d better get a wriggle on, I think, if they are beginning to crumble away at that rate.

Coastal erosion will, of course, one day mean that the entire British Isles crumbles into the sea, unless there’s some kind of tectonic shift which lifts it up again, of course, and everything we know will one day be nothing but a forgotten non-memory. There is some suggestion that the entire British Isles will rotate clockwise and be pushed ever northwards by the massive geological forces at work underground, but that does rather suppose that there’s something left to shift once the wind and the waves have done their worst and all our notions of nationality and boundaries have been erased by time’s crucible.

For those of you hoping that these islands might just get shifted to warmer climes, well, it seems that’s just not going to happen, and even if it did, despite those natty little sequences that you can find on-line which show the continents moving through all of the world’s history in about ten seconds, it would have taken slightly longer than that anyway. Imagine a flight to North America that travelled at about the speed your fingernails grow and you’d still be travelling far quicker than the rocks were.

We’ve become so impatient these days, haven’t we? Geological time just isn’t fast enough for us, so we animate it up to super-speed to get it all over with in the bink of an eye,  then get disappointed by the slow reality of it, whilst still managing to be amazed when houses built a mile or so from the seashore suddenly find themselves hanging over a precipice and then falling over it, or shocked by a devastating Tsunami, as the devastating truth of what it really means still manages to catch us unawares.

Whether or not it’s the worry over the cost of the house that worries us more than the vanishing land does, I suppose, at least put a very “human” perspective on something that is both inevitable and quite terrifying, even if you’re living in a land-locked county a very long way from the sea.

Perhaps, as an old friend of mine once stated, we really ought to be “making friends with the fish” after all, because we’re very likely to be sharing the watery parts of the planet with them again one day.

It’s time, perhaps, to start thinking about resurrecting those long-forgotten gills again, unless, of course, another magma surge lifts up a whole new continent for whatever humanity becomes to stagger around upon. You see, that’s the trouble with continental drift and plate tectonics, you can never really be sure about what you’re going to end up with, only that, with certain rare exceptions, it’s all going to happen rather slowly.

But the truth is that this layout of the Earth that we’re all so familiar with and upon which we have played out so much of our human history that we tend to think of it as being fairly permanent will all vanish one day, and all of our notions of America and Europe and all the rest will be as meaningless as, perhaps, they ought to already be.

I know that it’s just geology, but when your homeland starts crumbling away so dramatically, it does kind of put a few things into perspective, and makes you wonder, perhaps, what your priorities really ought to be.

SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

It was suggested recently that, in order to improve my happiness quotient, I should give myself something good to look forward to. A holiday, a day out, a visit to a test match or, at least, something that might be considered to be something enjoyable to do. It was a very good suggestion and I was very pleased that someone thought enough about my well-being to suggest it, and, if I ever do feel like I’m likely to get a moment in my life to consider getting away from it all for a little while, I might even very well consider such a thing.

But how can I…?

You might very well suggest that I need to get a sense of proportion over this, and, in all honesty, I’m likely to agree with you, but, in six billion years, this rock we’re all sitting on will probably just be dead world floating in space around a feeble sun, and nothing any of us have ever done ever will really matter very much. Granted, six billion years is a very long time, and I’m not really at all likely to be still around to worry about it, but, just occasionally, when you start to think about the bigger picture and suchlike, it really does make you wonder what we’re all doing with our lives when nothing we ever do can possibly ever matter or make any real difference to anything.

Whether that’s something that should affect any of those little daily decisions we all make is of course debateable. One of the things that we should all try as we flit through our lives in the blink of an eye is to try at the very least to do no harm and try to make the experiences of those who share this planet with us at the same time as us as pleasant as it is possible for us to do. That and, oh, I don’t know, maybe find some time to enjoy ourselves every once in a while. So, while we all give some thought as to quite how we’re all going to do that, here are a few other things to think about.

As human beings we do like to think that we’ve made our mark on things, but we really do struggle with our geological timescales. In pretty much the whole history of mankind, most of our landscape, barring the odd earthquake and volcano, has seemed to be fairly constant and laughably even considered to be “steady as a rock”. We know an awful lot now about plate tectonics and continental drift and how the world is constantly changing, but for all of  recorded human history, our world and our maps to move around within that world have appeared to be essentially much the same.

However, in geological terms we will all one day be gone and totally forgotten, without making hardly a mark, unseen and unknown of by a cold, cold, universe, and with all our understanding of it gone with us. What is there of the human world that we currently occupy that we can say with any real certainty will still exist in a million or a billion years time? None of our engineering or architecture, none of our records or technology, maybe not even any of our bones will survive the crushing turmoil of the planet as it smashes and recreates its own crust. Maybe the odd sliver of rock somewhere folded in all the various strata will give a faint clue that mankind was once here, maybe the faintest of traces of an excess of carbon in one thin line in the stones will be all that will tell the universe that there was ever something approaching a civilisation here.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? It puts a lot of our daily little struggles and worries in some sort of perspective. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with having a sense of proportion. The vast bulk of time against our individual little flickers of existence seems awfully big in comparison.

While we’re all thinking about that rather humbling bigger picture, I should also point out that I’m still struggling with the notion of the directionality of deep time. If I can look far enough in one direction to see light that is from the residue of the big bang, what if I look the other way…? Surely I could see the deep future…? If I can look far enough to see the big bang, and that bang went in all directions at once, what’s to be seen on the other side of it? I know that these thoughts of mine are all probably nonsense, by the way, due to our relative position constantly being in a state of flux, but it’s just the kind of thing that keeps me awake at nights.

I know, I know, why don’t I just worry about how to pay the bills…? Well, I do that as well, of course, and I’m still trying to come up with a unified theory that might convince the gas and electricity companies that, as I was essentially formed from the same stuff as the products that they try to sell to me, and I inhabit the same universe as it, surely it already belongs to me and therefore they shouldn’t be able to sell me what is essentially already mine and trying to make fiscal gain out of selling me back my own kin seems somehow ghoulish.

I have yet to convince them.

Behold!
The second law
of thermodynamics!
Again.

Then, of course, there’s that constant niggling worry that if universal descent into nothingness is inevitable, due to entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, what is the point of getting up in the morning? Entropy’s going to get you in the end, that’s apparently mathematically inevitable, so everything else in the universe can seem pretty pointless from time to time (whatever that is…). Granted it’s one hell of a long way into the far future, but then, if past, present and future can all be seen simultaneously, then it could be as soon as teatime today. Relatively speaking, of course. I’m not advocating that you should eat everything in the cupboards now just to stop it from going to waste.

As well as all that, there’s the lightspeed constant to think about. If some light is going one way at the speed of light, and another beam heads off in precisely the opposite direction at the speed of light, then as far as that individual particle is concerned, it’s particle pal is running away from it at a relative speed of twice the speed of light which is of course impossible, which is when the mathematics of slow-time comes into play and my mind, which is pretty uneducated in these matters, explodes in its own kind of big bang. Crikey! When you’re lying awake thinking about this kind of stuff, the morning seems a heck of a long way away, and the faster you try to think, the further away it will seem. Or is that nearer…? That one always confuses me…

I still think that it’s interesting to keep on pondering about pseudo-scientific stuff. Even if my knowledge of it is fairly uneducated, half-learned and ill-informed, I still get a lot of satisfaction out of thinking about these matters. All that misunderstanding, it really does help to keep me awake at nights. Perhaps, instead of just lying there and worrying, I should just get up and read a book about it all to get everything straight in my mind, although, I suspect that really would give me something to worry about.

Perhaps I do need a holiday after all…