Considered Opinions

Time Is Of The Essence

I have often said that God’s most serious design error in the creation of humans shows up most notably in our inability to comprehend large numbers. We see it in the out-of-control spending of the Federal government, where one congressperson ^[i]NO; not Maxine Waters thought a billion dollars was equal to ten million dollars, not to mention an almost universal misunderstanding of  climate change  in the life of the Planet.

The problem has been worsened in recent decades by a total lack of formal training in hard science in our schools, but even people who work with scientific principals daily are often unable to comprehend large numbers when dealing with “time”.

Fortunately, it seems that shifting the focus from “time” to “distance” helps most people grasp the numbers, as does breaking “time” into more manageable increments; hence the following metaphor.

A Simple Metaphor
Take a book from your library. It is probably 5 or 6 inches by 8 inches or so and has around 500 pages (250 sheets)^[ii]My copy of “For Whom The Bell Tolls+ is 507 pages and the “Holy Quoran” comes in at 724, not including the Index or Glossary.  Of course, the “Holy Quoran” shows each verse in both English and Arabic.
From the other extreme, my copies of “Call Of The Wild” and “Treasure Island” are 211 and 289 pages each. My “CRC” book from college is 524 so 500 seems like a good compromise., each being 0.006 inches thick: so the book measures about 1-1/2 inches in thickness. It doesn’t need to be this Hemingway classic – any book will do.

There are likely about 50 lines on a page, each consisting of about a dozen words and, let’s say an average of 52 characters, so if we think of a line as a year, and a letter as a week, then viewing the book lying open on the table, would give us weekly granularity of a Century in time.

We might go a step further and think of each letter as a seven-segment display ^[iii]Think LCD wristwatch or cash register display.  In other words, if the book were printed in a seven-segment font^[iv]It is not, of course. That format is useful only for electronic displays, each of the seven segments of each character on the page would be the equivalent of a day in time, making all 36,500 days visible at once.

 

A Look Forward From The Big Bang
One such book would therefore contain 25,000 years (250 sheets X 100 years per sheet), so stacking up 40 books next to the shortest person you know^[v]Napoleon wasn’t really short. At the time of his death, he measured 5 feet 2 inches in French units, the equivalent of 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern measurement units, (National Gallery of Victoria)., that stack would represent a million years, and if we lay 999 more of those short people end-to-end, we begin to see what a billion years might look like – 1,000 Napoleons stretching out for a mile with a stack of books next to each. Using powerful binoculars; we can almost see the one-billion-year stack of books. The age of the Earth is then over four miles of Napoleons, and the age of the Universe is almost 15 miles, which of course is obscured from view by the curvature of the earth.

Another way to think about it is to grasp a couple of dozen pages from one of the books between your thumb and forefinger as you consider those miles of Napoleons. You have in your grasp the equivalent of all written history, and it is no thicker than a coin in your pocket.

Thinking now about the very first book, where the “Big Bang” occurred we start walking toward the present time, keeping in mind that each sheet of each book we pass represents more than the lifespan of a human, and with each step, we blur together 25,000 human generations – never mind of course that for all but the last step of this 14-mile journey there were no humans.

After several hours of walking, we can almost see the end of the books, no more than 1/4 mile ahead. The next 10,000 books we pass will contain the lives of the dinosaurs and their extinction of 65 million years ago, but we are still a long way from the half-dozen books, containing Neanderthal’s time on Earth. Exhausted from this day-long walk, we pick up the next-to-last book from the end of the very last stack to find what scientists call the “Great Leap Forward”, a time, 50,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens developed language, art, and fine tools.

In the last 500-page book, after walking all day, past 14,000 such stacks, we find Christ on page 480. Buddha’s life is probably on page 476 or so, and Mohammad can be found around page 484. WW II is partway down the next-to-last page of the last book in the last stack and “911” is near the bottom of the very last page of that book – book number 650,880.

Looking Back
Now let’s turn around to look back at this 14-mile, all-day walking adventure. As we stand there;

• from the front of an eyeball to the very tip of an eyelash represents the time since humans migrated from Asia, across the frozen North, to populate the Americas,
• at the end of our nose is the peak of the last glaciation period – believed to have caused the extinction of Neanderthal in Europe some 20,000 years earlier,
• at the tip of a finger of an extended arm would take us to the time that the collision of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates pushed Central America up from the seafloor to begin the oscillations that have brought about the 7 most recent climate changes, spanning the last 650,000 years or so,
• barely 2 or 3 footsteps back along the 14-mile trip would be both Java Man and Peking Man – the earliest evidence of anything resembling modern humans,
• and a mere 25 feet back along the 14-mile path just traveled is the slowly rising sea breaking over Gibraltar and flooding the Mediterranean Basin at a rate of 1,000 times the present-day Amazon River.

 

And finally, for the engineers in the audience, we can fall back on unit analysis and scientific notation to conclude that the ratio of the time needed to tie one’s shoes is to the life span of a human being, as the life of the human being is to the age of the Universe.

By: Jim
Written: April 2019
Published: August 2019
Revised: March 2021
Revised: December 2022