welcome to earf

I recall that there was a series of nature films that I had to watch at some point in college or high school--or maybe at my dad’s house when he lived in Colorado and I was too young to go out on my own much while he was at work so mainly stayed around his home and yard and watched stuff he had recorded, my favorites being shows about bugs and spiders.  Come to think of it, there was a tunnel web on the side of his house that, in retrospect, I should not have been poking with a stick to see what would come out.  Nothing ever did come out--probably because my ‘cricket in distress’ impression sucks--but something could have, and it seems that only very poisonous spiders with big fangs build tunnel webs.  Sometimes my brother would walk with me down to the local market, and I would make sure to buy some Nerds candy just about every visit, even if I didn’t get anything else.  On my next birthday my dad sent me a case of Nerds.  Good for him, noticing what I liked and playing to it, but is there such a thing as too many Nerds?  Yes, yes there is.  At first I guarded the treats viciously, but by the end of the summer I was force feeding my friends those little pellets of colored sugar and preservatives because I just couldn’t stand it any more.  Still not a big fan of ‘strawberry-banana’ anything.  Or cotton candy.  You want to keep me away from your stuff just swath it all in strawberry-banana cotton candy.  Ick.

But I digress.  The narrator of the nature films was a British guy called David Attenborough, and he was great.  He always presented the material in a simple way, building on small principles and working his way up to more complicated ideas.  I happened on a book that he wrote a while back, title of ‘Life on Earth’.  It’s not the kind of book that I read in bed, because any book I read in bed puts me to sleep and I end up completely losing track and having to go back over the last 1-2 pages I “read”.  This Attenborough book I picked up is like his films, but all-encompassing rather than episodic.  It starts at the theoretical beginning of our planet and proceeds up through simple organisms, on up to more complex, and then discusses individual species’ behaviors.  I’m just now on the bit about mollusks.

Something he mentions in this book is how a lot of history can be found in the walls of the Grand Canyon, what with the layers and all.  Here’s a fun fact that dropped my jaw: the layer at the bottom of the canyon is 2,000 million years old.

2,000 million years.  If I were a geologist, that is the kind of figure that would make me put down my mechanical pencil and go get another beer.

There is a popular analogy that compresses the entirety of the earth’s history as a planet into a one standard year.  In this year, those bottom strata would appear in mid-September--meaning, of course, that the Earth as a whole is more than double this age--and we aren’t in any kind of position to speak about how many birthdays the universe has had.  It’s worth mentioning that in this model, man appears in the evening on December 31.

So, given this information, what may a reasonable person conclude?  Well, I suppose that’s up the the individual, but as for me and my house we choose to think that man is not the point, that this place we live in was not built for us.  It may be fantastic to think that the whole of human history--skyscrapers and woodworking and space flight and ice cream sandwiches--all of it began with sludge and lightning 3000 million years ago or so.....but this makes so much more sense than the whole shebang just popping into existence a shade over 6000 years ago, as some have said.