The Missing Story
To me this timeline captures something essential: how for hundreds of millions of years, change has happened here, usually quite slowly, at a pace no human could perceive if we somehow took a time machine back and tried to live through it.
This time of year, when the secularized stories of holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah have taken their central social places once again, my mind wanders to the kind of story that was labeled 'pre-historic' when I was a kid. Basically all of the stories of this changing planet prior to records of human activities 2 million years or so ago. They were stories that never very felt real to me when I was growing up- or really at any time in my adulthood until I started volunteering at the Harvard Natural History Museum in my 30's.
Yet, flash forward: my time as a regular volunteer on Sundays is in the past, a steady drumbeat of climate change stories is in the news every week, and my sense of time & scale now automatically links this unfolding news story to the natural history I absorbed. The photo above is a recent one I took of the timeline of life on Earth at the museum (our species makes an appearance in the very last panel on the right). To me this timeline captures something essential: how for hundreds of millions of years, change has happened here, usually quite slowly, at a pace no human could perceive if we somehow took a time machine back and tried to live through it. Even just looking at fossils like the ones in this photo opens a kind of gap in my mind- since that scale of 'hundreds of millions of years' feels so beyond conceivable time.
Seeing this timeline can inspire more awe and humility than just reading about it in a book- a kind of amazement that it is like multiple Earths have existed on this one Earth before primates even arrived on the scene- but there is a lot to absorb, & I feel like for many this stays a very peripheral story about 'a long time ago'. Yet one of the big mass extinction events, in which more than 70% of species died, had features that sound quite familiar. This happened 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian Period when volcanic eruptions led to 6 times higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which resulted in hot oceans, wildfires, drought, and (as featured in the July 2022 issue of Scientific American), algal blooms in rivers and lakes. Imagine if awareness of that event was seen as globally significant & as appreciated as the story of Santa Claus.