Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution

[Kolesar]

NY Times Opinion
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: August 23, 2005
Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us.

I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old.
The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this.
One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution.
....continued.......

[phantom power]

1. Does anybody else miss the days of...

Carl Sagan? I remember a few years on PBS when it was like a Golden Age of Reason. Cosmos, Attenborough's Life on Earth series, Connections.

I always thought Sagan's "cosmic calendar" episode conveyed the time-scale of various events, from cosmic to recorded history, about as effectively as humanly possible.

That moment when he shows the teeny, little red square, the last 10 seconds of the Cosmic Year, and says "Every human we know anything about, all of recorded history, is in this one red square."

Damn. To think Sagan is dead, and dark-age cretins like Tim Lahaye still walk the earth, and our "president" advocates the teaching of intelligent design.

[toddaa]

2. The Human Animal

Desmond Morris' PBS miniseries was, hands down, the most fascinating documentary I've ever seen.

[progressoid]

3. I had dinner with James Burke in the 80's

I loved Connections.

And Cosmos was great! - What happened to TV?

[phantom power]

4. PBS should re-run all those shows.

I got the DVD box set of Cosmos, and I was amazed at how current it still is. Maybe I'm just showing my age, but I haven't seen a really good science program in years. Seems as though it's all fluff like "Shark week" and "storm stories" these days. Somebody ran a three hour series on string theory last year, but it was terrible.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. I thought the string theory show was okay

What didn't you like about it?

[phantom power]

6. Hmm. For one thing, they didn't discuss any actual string theory until...

the third hour. I like the fact that they would include historical background, etc, but there was literally more history, context, etc, than there was content about the supposed subject of the show.

And the entire thing was done in that contemporary style which I find overly glib. It left me with the impression of being more visual-jokes than content.

I'm sure it isn't easy to write a program like that, considering that the true details are beyond most people, including myself. But I've seen other people strike a better middle ground, for instance "The Universe in a Nutshell."

[Kolesar]

7. I must have sneezed when they explained the string theory

Because I just did not get it. The show was poorly written, to say the least.

[salvorhardin]

9. Nova

That was Nova that did the string theory show.
The Elegant Universe
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/

Not their best and amazingly overproduced but I didn't think it was too bad.

[salvorhardin]

8. Damn, I envy you

James Burke's Connections (and The Day The Universe Changed) was like a lightning rod for me, as was Cosmos.

Re: What happened to TV?
I think there's still some good stuff out there. The BBC, especially Horizons, seems to do some really awesome stuff from time to time. Time Team, which is sort of a science-lite show that Channel4 airs is good for popularizing archaeology and history but due to the reality TV format sometimes skimps on the science part.

The big problem is that now there are so many channels to fill there's just that more crap drowning out the good stuff.

What is distressing to me though is the degree to which PBS, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and The Learning Channel have almost become parodies of what they once were. Well, maybe that's being too harsh with PBS. I think they're trying anyway. Still, I remember when The Learning Channel first started and they would show all these older, but still fresh, documentaries (including Connections marathons) and Annenberg-CPB educational programming. It was awesome, then all of a sudden they became the home improvement channel.

[phantom power]

10. News Flash: I just read that the Science Channel will show Cosmos!

I don't know the dates. Probably on their website somewhere.