Geological time interests me, if only because the passages of time are so long in relation to human history. Before anything else, I am an historian, whether an economic historian or a broadly social historian (who dreams of the eventual possibilities for writing a good economic, political, and cultural history of triplex and quadplex houses in Montreal, assuming that one does not already exist). Archaeological records on the social existence of urban Hittites in eleventh century BCE Turkey blow my mind for their temporal distance to me - it is just so long ago. Then we can go back to the first passages of homo sapiens out of the East African Rift Valley some 120,000 years ago. But the Himalayas, one of the youngest mountain ranges on the planet, arose from an orogeny (a collision of the Indian subcontinental plate with the Eurasian plate) 70 MILLION years ago.
It leaves me spellbound to contemplate that, someday, probably about 400 million years from now, the Himalayas will look like foothills in comparison to other great ranges in the world, the same way that we in New England look at much of the Green and White Mountains or the Adirondacks in comparison with the Rockies. More importantly, while our planet will no doubt remain a green place, even if its flora have changed in form, it seems quite obvious that its fauna will have changed dramatically and that homo sapiens, as a species, will certainly not be around to witness the end effects of such changes. Moreover, it is doubtful that any trace of the existence of homo sapien as a dominant species for a microscopically short period in the course of geological history will remain as evidence that we were here. Our cities, our endless prairies of corporate industrial agriculture, our impacts on the course of major hydrological systems - all gone! No cars (rusted away), no statues, maybe even no plastics, nothing to tell anyone interested that we were here and there was intelligence, civilization, religion, science, faith that nature was ours to do with as we pleased and that heaven was the destiny bequeathed to us by a loving God. Nothing but green, and maybe the rise of some new species-civilization on largely distinct and divergent biological terms with no memory or understanding that eons before they had cracked the soil to learn agriculture under very different circumstances, we believed we had solved all of the same scientific problems on which they would embark, including the origins and age of the universe and the impending death of our solar system and our planet.
