Cosmic Reflections

While driving back to Vegas after spending Christmas in Denver, Milt and I talked about how to understand the Deep Time of our planet and our human place within it. In the fourteen hours of travel time, here’s what we came up with:
We’d use the human body as a measure of all of Earth’s Time. Thus, with my feet planted on the ground marking beginnings of earth at the birth of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, the first cell appears at my ankle (3.8 bya), life’s common ancestor is at calf level (3.5 bya), multiple cellular life emerges at the knee (3 bya), sexual reproduction comes into being at hip level (2 bya), plants and oxygen come about at shoulder height (1 bya), the Cambrian Explosion is at the elbow (500 million years ago) of my arm as extended over my head, dinosaurs come and go just below the wrist (70 mya), and at the wrist bone itself is homo sapiens (2 mya). In the span of Time between the two lines wringing my wrist, modern human migrated out of Africa and walked on the moon.
The palm of my hand represents the amount of Time that Earth has left….the 500 million years scientists estimate for the natural life of the planet. The same length of Time since the Cambrian Explosion is all there yet is to go!
Humans are the species that knows it is alive and will one day die; we may also be the only species to know that our planet too is finite. What we do with that new knowing is every bit as important to our spiritual, cultural, and psychological evolution as was ritually burying our dead.
So I love the image of the remaining Earth Time being symbolically contained in the palm of a single human hand….for metaphorically, the quality of life on the planet IS indeed in our hands at this moment of evolutionary Time. We have become a planetary force as our destructive behaviors disrupt the very systems that brought us forth: the water, air, and soil that support all life is being sacrificed for the obscene profit of the power-mad one percent of the earth’s population. Who gave them the right to oppress the rest of us, the 99 percent plus the animal, vegetable, and mineral resources of our one planet?
In these opening weeks of the New Year, we the people are taking back our power and saying no to their lies and greed. For example, the president has stopped the construction of the XL Keystone pipeline, in spite of being bullied by the Republican Congress and the overt threat of political retaliation by Big Oil.
But it was the power of the people demonstrating and getting arrested in front of the White House that exposed the truth about the number of jobs this project promised (2500 temporary ones at most, NOT 20,000 that TransCanada projected) and for whom the oil is intended (NOT the US; it was headed for a the Koch Brothers’ Texas refinery to be exported to Europe, Asia, and China), and, most crucially, about the environmental effect of burning that amount of dirty fossil fuel: it would be the game changer for the climate, NASA’s James Hansen assures us. It’s about time we finally stop this insanity.