On Deep Time

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” ― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Art by Jordan Cheung

This concept has been bouncing around my brain for a while so bear with me as I crystallise it into something coherent in this article.

The world around has been shaped through time in an immense arc of non-human involvement. We have existed for but a brief second in the long hour of all of existence. Deep time is one of geology's greatest gifts to philosophy, It is the idea that the vastness of time experienced for geological events is insignificant compared to the same for us. There are many important schools of thought that have originated from the same and here are my contributions to this discourse.

First, let’s understand deep time

Deep time is the phrase used to describe looking at the immense timescale of our planet. Here’s an analogy to help you understand the same.

If we think of all of Earth’s history as having been condensed to just one day, then the timescale we use here is a 24 hour day. The Earth forms at midnight then cools down from a molten state to form oceans and escape the constant carpet bombing from asteroids in around 4 hours. At this point, primitive single-celled lifeforms appear at 4 AM and subsequently, photosynthetic organisms show up at around 6 AM. Nothing much happens over the next 6 hours except the slow build-up of oxygen from the same photosynthetic life. The atmosphere becomes oxygen-rich by noon. By 1 PM, we can witness single-celled eukaryotic life and by 5 PM the first multicellular life forms make an appearance. The first aquatic animals don’t arrive until after 8 PM. Plants colonize land by 9.30 PM and land animals follow at 10 PM. The dinosaurs have a fun time for an hour from 10.40 to 11.40 PM. Human ancestors split off from the rest of the hominids at 11.58 PM, and modern humans arrive at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds (11:59:59).

Deep Time and Religion

Religion has been one of the longest standing societal structures to stand the test of time. It has thus been an effective register to catalogue human thought around the concept of deep time.

We have always tried to understand our place in the universe and thus invented cosmology before which religion was our sole tool to explain existence.

It is common in various pantheons for the idea of deep time to be a core tenet. Hindus, for example, express deep time through the concept of ‘yugas’. These are lengths of time so vast, they render time itself meaningless. Like an ouroboros, time curves on itself into a circle with various yugas being the building blocks for this rendition of eternity.

Deep Time and Space

We are an incredibly isolated civilization. I say this, under the theory that there are millions of civilizations out there, due to the sheer number of planets, stars, systems and galaxies in our universe. We are probably stranded in the middle of the universal equivalent of the Sahara desert. We have been sending out transmissions for decades on end and have yet to hear anything except the monotonous hum of the universe. The kicker here is the fact that our transmissions will only travel to 100,000 light-years around us, which is an infinitely small distance in the grand scheme of things.

Let us think for a moment that another civilization with the ability to travel space at the speed of light is approaching us from 100,000 light-years away and has an extremely powerful telescope trained on Earth. They won’t see the present, they will see the earth as it was 100,000 years ago and will continue to see our ancestors evolve from mere animals to beings that have reigned at the top of the food chain against all odds. They will see the history of civilizations before their eyes, the pyramids will be built, Rome will fall once again and we will be the first beings in our neighbourhood to venture into the depths of space.

This just proves that a living record of our history that has been etched into time exists for the universe to see. This forms the paradox where we might die as a civilization but we have already been immortalized by time itself, so will we ever really die?

Deep Time and Humanity

Despite our relatively short time here, we are an ancient civilization. Our earliest written records only date back to 5,500 years ago. The issue here is that we have existed in our current form for at least 100,000 years. This means that all of recorded history represents only 5.5% of the human experience.

The Trojan War happened 3,250 years ago. This is such a large length of time in our lifespans that most historians assumed that the Illiad was a myth. They were entirely shocked to find the ruins of Troy itself, even greek historians living less than 1000 years after the war were dubious of its existence. A lot of our history only exists because someone bothered to write stuff down.

The most likely explanation for the vast majority of ancient aliens-style historical mysteries is that sometime in that 90,000+ year black hole of history (much longer if you want to include the cultural timespan of other hominids) there was at any given point plenty of cultural exchange between continents by people or civilizations that we will likely never know about. There could have been an advanced civilization that reigned for 15,000 years with a global reach and organized religion that then collapsed, fought a 1,000-year civil war that was then followed by another 3,000 year golden age (I'm just making up numbers but you get the idea) and we could still likely never know of it. I suspect that the commonality we see between many different ancient religions is a case of those religions being the diaspora of a major unified religion from sometime in the mists of the past.

Add on to this that any settlements or cities were likely razed as a result of time even if abandoned untouched. Many would have been ground away as a result of tectonic activity, ice sheets and flooding. Most are likely buried in the ocean or the deserts and waste of once fertile deserts. Imagine the coastal cities that were buried by water in the ever-rising and changing coastline.

If I had a time machine, I wouldn't go back and visit ancient Rome but instead a random point 40 or 50 thousand years ago. Maybe I'd fly around looking for the legendary battle described in the Mahabharata which describes flying battle machines and what appears to be a nuclear detonation(complete with descriptions of radiation sickness).

Final Thoughts

The strangeness of this concept has boggled my mind for the longest period. It is filled with paradoxes and riddles, truths and lies and utter confusion. All I know is that, for us humans, it all boils down to this: We are significant in our time but amount to nothing when presented with its eternal nature.

Our significance wanes away with us and maybe there is a certain freedom to the idea of being so inconsequential that everything we do is special in its own right.