Reverend Greg

Time out

Our universe is 15 billion years old, by some estimates. Earth originally had no oxygen, no rain. The first rains were boiling hot and fell upon the Earth for millions of years. Because of the Earth’s mass and its position relative to the Sun, its atmosphere did not drift off into space. Water was held to the Earth’s surface, as a liquid, as a sold and as a gas.

The oceans formed.

It was in water that life began almost 4 billion years ago. Whether from sulfur springs in the deep sea, or from pools where space dust came to rest. It may have even been that minerals provided scaffolding around which living matter organized itself.

We’re really not sure.

The first life was bacteria. Oxygen was still a rare gas and a danger to life on planet Earth. The development of the cell nucleus was a major step in evolution on this planet. After the nucleus came multi-cellular beings. Slowly a food chain developed as life made its rapid development over millions of years. Cells learned to band together and form more complex creatures, upping their chances for survival. The sea sponge may be one of the earliest of these complex creatures.

Even while oxygen was forming from waste gas expelled by the tremendously successful microbial life underneath the sea, there was no life on land. Undersea bacteria would eventually all but extinct itself due to its own success. While many joke about how the cockroach may be the only living survivor of a nuclear holocaust, terrestrial life on Earth is that very cockroach thriving in the holocaust of prior extinctions.

By new estimates 97% of the inhabitable living space on Earth is in the deep oceans. Terrestrial life on our planet is an aberration, a rare and unlikely variation. We are the strange exception to life on the ocean world Earth. Our history, the history of air breathing warm-blooded animals is so short as to be almost unnoticeable in light of the history of life on Earth. We are the strange new-comers: the bad seed that was forced from his home, the black sheep of Earth’s multi-cellular animal family.

Mankind – human beings, he who walks on two legs and descending from apes…. How short our unique history is even compared to the short history of air-breathing terrestrial animal life? We did not appear yesterday, we appeared a breath ago, a mere blink of the cosmic eye. We have been here so short a time as to not be measurable at all by any scale even remotely useful in measuring real time on Earth.

Even shorter and even more frightening to comprehend is the blink of time in which human self-awareness came into existence. That moment when primordial man left the metaphorical garden of eden and took intellectual control of his perception of his world is no mere yesterday, rather it is in that millionth of the very last micro-second.

We live, as “modern man”, in an illusion of having evolved into a beautiful and god-like creature, capable of dangerous technological creation and mind-altering art. We parade and prance like a great-ape descendant, a master of his own world as though we have been here always and will be here forever.

The history of man is too short to be measured in any scale other than its own. The creation of religion, society, civilization, warfare, all of these things have occurred in a space of time unimaginably brief. While we still are fortunate to be able to study much of our own human history through the current existing primitive human societies we nonetheless act as predator towards our own species. Is this caused by jealousy or is it self-loathing?

There are those who ponder whether or not human intelligence is in fact an aberration of itself, like some deep psychosis from which we seek to awake in order to rejoin the natural living world. Human beings can be both creator and destroyer of themselves. We have even now arrived at a fork-in-the-road of our own destiny. Millions upon millions of species have come and gone in the blink of the cosmic eye on Earth. We too will have our time and whether or not we choose to perceive it as long or short, it will be merely a passing glance in the gaze of the universe.

Even more disturbing is to consider that our destructive and wasteful nature towards our planet, our home, and ourselves may in fact be a naturally occuring cycle from which we cannot escape. Perhaps we are still very much a part of the natural world indeed.

Reverend Greg, Shidoshi

Posted by revgreg at August 16, 2004 10:03 PM