I’ve just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness as part of my research, recommended to me by a friend. This has set me off on a geology trajectory which I’m finding hard to get off. I don’t want to get off!
Timefulness was an attempt, in my eyes, to show non-geologists the real depth of time in our planet’s history. There is so much more than dinosaurs. For example, there were about a billion years where unicellular organisms just floated about in the sea, pre-Cambrian Explosion. Some geologists call that time the “Boring Billion” which I think is pretty funny, because if it lasted a billion years, then it must have been VERY BORING. But boring for who?
I like to imagine just walking along the seashore somewhere on whatever the continent du jour might be, listening to what I imagine would be complete and utter silence. The waves of the ocean might be bigger since the moon is closer. The ocean might also stink because of a possible hydrogen sulphide or iron content (not enough oxygen!), I could tolerate that for a glimpse at what the world would have been like back then. Just… nothing going on.
Of course there are still many many gaps to fill in our deep timeline, and geologists are working hard to put together the pieces of that eon to see if the Boring Billion was a little less boring than it seemed.
As I’m doing some extra reading, I saw this quote from an article by Simon Poulton:
I would now argue that the “boring billion” is every bit as exciting and important to understand as anything that happened in the past 500m years of Earth history. If we do not understand periods of relative stasis, then what hope do we have for understanding times of monumental change?
Here we are, most of us at least, living out a few pandemic-induced months of inconvenience. But part of me is looking at the Boring Billion thinking, “ah yeah, they know what it’s like.” How do they know what it’s like!? Was anything even sentient at that point!? (…does anything need to be sentient for me to relate to it?)
But that’s a digresson. My main point is:
A billion years is a long time. The year 2020 was much, much shorter. A billion times shorter! I think our fear of wasting time partly stems from our inability to think long-term. Not like “next year” long term, but maybe even longer than that. If you spend a year of your life not moving from your bedroom — will that matter in 7 years’ time? There might be some lingering regrets or effects, but for the most part, it’s not going to be a huge gap in the geology of your life.
It’s not going to be a billion years of unicellular organisms floating in the ocean.