PASSAGE THROUGH TIME

Whether precise or beautiful, timekeepers only tell part of the story. The annual Legacy issue proves to be the perfect spot to reintroduce a general story about space-time itself

-  JOSH SIMS

Few of us truly understand time – not its metaphorical power, nor its physics as the fourth dimension. Few of us can comprehend quite how vast it is – or, as geologists refer to it, how deep it is – nor, in fact, humanity’s very recent place in it. Deep time stretches beyond us, beyond the written record, beyond the archaeological one. Needless to say, it stretches back beyond our own meagre efforts to track it. However, ask a geologist or an astrophysicist and they may have a party trick that rarely fails to wow fellow party guests; it even has something to do with human timekeeping.

“I like to compress the entire history of the universe into a calendar year and then point out that, on this scale, it’s not until early September that the Earth even comes into existence,” says Ethan Siegel, the science communicator behind the ‘Starts With a Bang’ blog. “It’s only on December 30th that the dinosaurs get wiped out. And humans evolve at something like 11.59 and 54 seconds before midnight on New Year’s Eve. On the universe’s scale we’re only here for a blink. Think about what might happen on January 2nd and you’re actually looking hundreds of millions of years ahead. Humanity may be gone. By February the sun will have boiled all the oceans on Earth away.”