The History of Time Part 1: Deep Time
A common “ism” I’ve adopted in my adulthood is “at the highest level”; and by adulthood, I mean when I took my first consulting job. The hyperbolic variation whose usage has increased recently is “at the highest of high levels”. Those who’ve read Becoming Polymathic for a while are probably fed up with these two prepositions. Unfortunately, to initiate this History of Time series, we’re going to need bare its usage once more as we start with the highest of high levels of time — deep time.
The Concept of Deep Time
As a concept, deep time stemmed from James Hutton’s observations at Siccar Point on the East Scottish coastline in 1788. During this period, there were two competing geological theories — Neptunism and Plutonism.
The Neptunists believed Earth’s land formations resulted from mineral coagulation of a mass ocean. The Plutonists believed the Earth’s land formations resulted from volcanic activity regenerating rock which was then cyclically deposited and eroded. Hutton fell into the latter camp, but he needed concrete evidence to demonstrate this regenerative cycle.
On the expedition to Siccar Point, Hutton was accompanied by fellow scientists John Playfair and James Hall. When they arrived, the point clearly did not follow the layered pattern suggested by the Neptunists. Instead, it showed two competing layered formations with a gap in the geological timescale.
These discrepancies provided Hutton the evidence he needed to confirm his Plutonist views and to postulate the earth’s geological history was far longer than the previously theorized 70,000 years. As a result, the term geological time became prevalent.
Applying Science to Deep Time
The emergence of paleontology combined with advancements in chemistry in the 19th Century provided the hard science necessary to organize Hutton’s geological time scale. In particular, the discovery of radioactivity. In 1913, British geologist Arthur Holmes compiled the first geologic timeline that dated the earth at 1.6 billion years old. It wouldn’t be until 1953 that American geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson would accurately date the earth at 4.6 billion years old, give or take 50 million years.
Expanding the Concept
As a term, deep time would first appear in 1981 as part of writer John McPhee’s biographical work Basin and Range. In this context, deep time described the incomprehensible periods of time required to create the great land formations of the western United States. From here, we’ll expand the term to describe the even longer time periods required to form our known universe.
As you probably know, the universe began ~13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Applying some basic math, that means there was a gap of 9.2 billion years between the formation of the universe and that of the earth. From there, it would take another ~1 billion years for the first prokaryotic cells to form and another 1.5–2 billion years for the first eukaryotic ones. The multicellular organism wouldn’t evolve for another ~0.4 billion years, and ~ 0.5 billion years would pass before the first animals. The dinosaurs do not appear until ~0.4 billion years after that, and humans another ~0.2 billion.
A Deep Time Thought Experiment
These timelines are deliberately outlined in billions of years. The numbers here are incredibly large. However, since we encounter them every day, usually through the lens of monetary wealth, they don’t seem incomprehensible. However, through the lens of human-derived time measurements, they are at a scale our minds can’t define. To demonstrate, we’ll use days as a starting point for this thought experiment.
There are 365 days in one year. There are ten years in a decade. There are ten decades in one century, the approximate time between Hutton’s geological time discovery and the discovery of radioactivity. There are ten centuries in one millennium, the time between the first usage of modern timekeeping terminology (second, minute, etc.) and the present. One thousand millennia make up one million years. One thousand million years is a billion years.
We’ll again apply some simple math — 365 days/year x 10 year/decade x 10 decade/century x 10 century/millennia x 1000 millennia/million x 1000 million/billion x 13.8 billion = 5.0 trillion days
Lets now take that number and convert it to dollars. Five trillion dollars is approximately the combined GDP of France and Russia. GDP is the collective revenue of a country’s economy. In this part of the experiment you are a business owner in said economy. Your business would generate $365/$5,000,000,000,000 — or $0.000000000072. Nothing.
Why Math?
The purpose of all this rudimentary math is to demonstrate a critical point fundamental to this series of pieces. The scale you measure against matters as does the history of that scale. When thought of in terms of deep time, human history is a mere sliver, which is a terrifying thought. However, it is also a thought that is meant to recalibrate your perspective, as you would a mechanical watch.
Along those lines, we will discuss the origins of modern timekeeping terminology and the tools we invented to measure them in our next piece.
Be more.
Become polymathic.
Quote of the Week: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.” — Stephen J. Gould
