A Little Perspective

   I read somewhere that going through life without understanding nature is like walking through a museum with all the paintings turned towards the wall. I went to good schools that taught me the life cycles of the insects and all that. I got passing grades, but the details didn't stick. I was more interested in reading stories. My father used to carry out little science experiments for my benefit. We'd take his barometer to the cellar and then to the attic. "Look," he'd say. "The needle moved." And so it had. I'd ask to go to the bathroom where I could read the sports section in peace.

  In high school I was offered information on physics and chemistry. I could have gone on to be an engineer or a doctor. Instead I went to college and studied English literature. Later on when I read that thing above about the pictures in museums I started to make an effort. I learned the names of the trees and birds that had been rustling and chirping overhead all my life. I memorized the names of all the eons back to earth's beginnings, but I couldn't get them to stick. I was more interested in reading history.

  I'm getting down to the final era of the planet I call myself. I need to make my final kick to the finish line. When St. Peter says "Whadda ya know!" it better be something more cogent than, "Tom Brady's signed to play another season." I took up the chart of of the eons again. I realized that the different eons are named for what was going on at the time. 

  Cambrian: first shelled creatures, which gave rise to the corals. Devonian: first amphibians and fish. First forests (evergreens) which in the Carboniferous era turned those forests into coal. Knowing these events helped keep the eons in order. The trouble is that each eon is further subdivided. I needed to keep some perspective.

  The big question is when and how life began at all. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. At first it was a mass of bubbling magma. Once things cooled off about 3.7 billion years ago life got started as a single celled bacterium. It wasn't much to look at but its DNA had a penchant for experimentation. After a few hundreds of millions of years, it invented photosynthesis, which led to oxygen.  Then it invented sex which led to us.

(Please single tap one of the images. You can then scroll through the thumbnails at the bottom.)

Here's a kids eye view of life on earth. The interesting stuff starts half a billion years ago. This squashes the four billion previous years into three layers at the bottom. 

Putting earth's 4.5 billion years on a calendar put things in proportion. The bacteria got to work in March. Things were quiet on the surface until November. Humans don't show up till the last few days in December.

  And here's a calendar that starts with the Big Bang. We humans show up at 11:52 on December 31. All of civilization occurs in the minute before midnight. Happy New Year! 

Be happy. Don't worry.