Big talk from a blip of a blip of a blip

An abstract cubist interpretation of species mass extinction. Image created by C Y Gopinath using Dall-E3

If you've seen a movie called Jurassic Park, the rest of this column should be a breeze. It also forms part of my humble diatribe about the absence of humility in our species and the towering arrogance with which we strut around. As a sideshow, you'll learn the real meaning of, "Oh my god, am I late for the party?"

What does this have to do with Jurassic Park? Besides being a memorable name for an exotic game park, Jurassic refers to a specific time in this planet's history. As you might cleverly guess, plenty of dinosaurs were around in the Jurassic Period.

Geology has always been a foggy thing for me. For example, I'm told our currently pathetic planet has been around for 4,600,000,000 years. That's more zeroes than my brain can handle but it does seems like an awfully long time.

I learned today that since 1961, the job of defining Earth's time scale has been the day job of scientists at the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGN). Since there were way too many zeroes, they broke it up into smaller intervals, each usually marked by some major happening such as an Ice Age or the appearance of fish.

I won't bore you with details and big words, but here's what you need to know. The IUGN broke up Earth's 4.6 billion years into eons, eras, periods, epochs and ages, in that order. For the last 4,200 years, we've been in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch, in the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era. This falls within the Phanerozoic Eon, which started about 541 million years ago. With zeroes, that's 541,000,000.

The only word you need to remember from that is Holocene.

If you're wondering what all this has to do with the price of onions, I urge patience. The breaking news is that the IUGN wants to change Holocene to Anthropocene, in recognition of the fact that for the first time humans, not nature, are changing the planet. Starting from around 1950, they claim that humans have been messing with the planet, what with the Industrial Revolution, atomic bombs, carbon emissions, drilling and mining, overfishing and all that other nasty stuff.

Humans deserve an epoch to themselves, they claim, because they are changing the planet just as dramatically as the asteroid that wiped out those poor dinosaurs after they'd thrived for 164,000,000 years.

Nature magazine calculated that the weight of everything manufactured by humans in 2020, garbage included, was 1.1 teratons (anthropogenic mass), for the first time in history more than the combined mass of living beings (biomass). Our combined plastics are already twice as heavy as all the animals, birds
and fish alive.

In July 2023, the International Commission on Stratigraphy announced the name. We are now officially in the Anthropocene Epoch.

Naturally, there's fighting in the streets. Some argue that human beings have an inflated sense of self-importance and wrongly believe that they are masters of the universe. To deserve a whole epoch named after them, dissidents say, humans should last millions of years, like the dinosaurs did. FYI, Dinos lasted 164 million years, and their extinction is still called an "event".

We've been around for a mere 300,000 or so years. Hardly any zeroes. And it does look like we're on our way out.

"Who cares what it's called?" wrote a lay reader who goes by Claytronica in The Atlantic magazine. "We are a pestilence. A blight. The cruellest joke is that we found ourselves at the top of the food chain."

My species has a memory problem. One of the most challenging concepts we struggle with daily is time. If grandpa lives to be 100, that's already a long time. Anything older than great-grandfather is out of mind, unrecorded, traceless and ancient.

Looking at the universe through this small window only centuries wide, we feel like bosses who have been around forever, masters of all we survey, but on the universe's timeline, we're the blip of a blip of a blip. America considers itself old, celebrating a trivial 400 years of recorded history, while India and China feel ancient, going on endlessly about their 5,000 years of wisdom.

5,000 years - that's about as much time as the average Patwardhan can wrap his mind around on this rock 4,600,000,000 years old.

To appreciate our limitless hubris, imagine a geological clock where 24 hours represents Earth's 4.6 billion years. Here's how events play out.

Nothing happens for the first 12 hours except violent volcanoes, thunder and lightning, biblical floods and earthquakes.

Between 11.29 am and 1.03 pm, cyanobacteria cells start creating oxygen, making the planet habitable. Life follows.

All sorts of fantastic creatures evolve but get regularly wiped out without a trace in mass extinction events.

Dinosaurs appear around 10.48 pm but become extinct instantly in an asteroid strike at 11.40 pm after ruling the Earth for 164 million years.

The moments tick by.

With four seconds to midnight, something terrifying happens at 23:59:07 - a frail two-legged species with a devilish mind and a giant ego emerges. Crowing about its greatness, it goes on a rampage of killing, plundering and annihilating the planet.

Welcome to the end of the party, humans.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper