Walt Whitman tells how when he was fed up with listening to the wranglers and debaters, who are always with us, he would go out into the friendly darkness and look up at the stars, which in his time were not hidden by the glare of neon signs advertising the latest ‘must have thing.’ The sight of those stars and the vastness of the starfield put the petty squabbles of egotistic wranglers into a different perspective.
I used to do the same thing in Canada when I was in the forested area of Northern Alberta and there weren’t any artificial lights. First time I had seen the stars since the blackout during WWII. But the stars in Canada looked like they were about 100 feet away and like dazzling diamonds on black velvet in a case at Tiffany’s. And unlike England there were often displays of the Northern Lights with their amazing curtains of color.
Whitman also, in Leaves of Grass, pointed out that he felt connected through all living things down through the millions of years when dinosaurs were eating the bodies of the plants that eventually became the body that Walt was using to experience the universe. The whole universe had conspired and worked together to bring him, and of course you to where he was on the day of his insight.
As has been frequently noted, when you start investigating any part of Nature you will eventually find that it is connected in some way to everything else. It’s a harmonious system of give and take, and the only things in it that don’t follow the laws of harmony in the system are humans, with their need to control everything, particularly other people.
The people who actually deal with the evolution of everything are the astronomers and astrophysicists, and these have come to a consensus that is difficult for the lay person to understand, particularly in America, where it seems that having the ability to think clearly, using discovered data is an un-American activity. Actually being intelligent, and informed, and at the same time unashamed of not being average is a social crime. Many of my regular readers have experienced the disgrace of not thinking like other people about popular subjects or objects of interest to the news media.
One of my own pet peeves is about Sumeria. The city of Sumer was a few thousand years old when archaeologists began to investigate it. They found that below Sumer there was the familiar New Stone Age type stuff, not very civilized or technically proficient from our modern point of view. But Sumer itself had more than 30 historical firsts. Here are a few: a city built on a grid plan, schools and libraries, a bi-cameral government system, accounting methods, the wheel, sophisticated mathematics that could deal with commerce and astronomy, two storey buildings and engineered drainage systems, a pharmaceutical knowledge of herbs and chemicals, the ability to mix metals and make alloys, etc., etc.
Before Sumer none of these things. After Sumer all of these things. And very few people have even taken notice of this historically verified material. One famous one is Zecharia Sitchin who can read all the languages of the time and translated many of the clay books. His paperbacks of the Earth Chronicles series explain much that historians have ignored because the facts don’t fit the current theories and are therefore ignored. Google his name.
The other famous one was a scientist, Carl Sagan. Google him too. He and Zecharia looked at the phenomenon and saw the same rational explanation; someone or something had given the current humanity of the time a jump start in evolution. Thirty firsts was beyond coincidence. Sagan realized it must have happened. Sitchin read the histories on clay tablets and on hieroglyphs and explained how it happened.
Historians are notorious for dismissing any ideas from non-established academic historians and very few even bothered to look at what was a problem to the scientist and the linguist.
And it was the scientist, who realized, and said, that if evolution had continued at its ‘normal’ rate across the world it would have taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to get to people as sophisticated as the people of Sumer, starting from the New Stone Age level. Don’t forget that in New Guinea and the Amazon forest there are still people at that level of sophistication.
Carl Sagan in his role as a populariser of astronomy and science hit upon an ingenious way to show how strange this jump was without actually pressing the fact. He did a Walt Whitman thing and looked at the whole picture of the human race, as far is it was known at the time, and correlated it to the evolution of the solar system and the galaxies of other universes. His metaphor was to call the whole of current history and prehistory one year, beginning with the Big Bang on January 1st and then noting where significant events occurred, in a year that encompassed the current estimate of 13.7 to 14.5 billion years of the age of the universe, December 31st of his metaphorical year would be the end of the year.
Using this model, and the American billion which is 1000 million, each day of our model year is about 40 million years and each second about 500 years. The last second of our galactic year would be about 500 years ago. Up to date current stuff would be in the first second of the current January 1st.
So on January 1st of our model was the Big Bang which has 70 years of continuous experimental and scientific observation still validating it as an explanation. It was Hubble who discovered that the galaxies were moving away from us and from each other it every direction. It follows therefore that many millions of years ago they were closer. Keep going down that path and you must conclude that somewhere down the time track all the current matter in the universe, in some form or other was condensed into a very small volume. Many scientists say it was about the size of an orange. Then on our January 1st space exploded and the space between galaxies has been expanding since. Think of it as how dots inked onto a balloon would separate as the balloon is blown up by some leather lunged uncle.
Around May 1st our Milky Way galaxy was formed. It wasn’t until September 9th that our solar system began to condense into its current form. Remember, every day is the equivalent of 40 million of our years. Around September 14th came the formation of planet Earth. In the day of September 25th life began in its lowest form on Earth. This actually happened before the formation of the oldest rocks now known on Earth which was around October 2nd. The oldest fossils we have found and the advent of blue green algae, primal ancestor of just about everything, occurred around October 9th some 280 million years later.
Notice that nothing human is yet in sight. Our bloviating politicians, celebrities and generals who think they are the most important things on Earth are just dreams of the oldest fossil plants, around November 12th.
In December things begin to speed up a bit. But it isn’t until December 1st that a significant atmosphere of oxygen begins to develop on the new planet. Around the 16th the first worms appear, maybe they are the ancestors of the politicians mentioned. Not until the 19th were there the first fish and creatures with spines. There was a great jump on December 20th when some plants began to colonize the land, shortly followed 40 million years later by the first insects who followed the plants to the land. Only another 40 million years later came the first winged insects and the first amphibians.
The 24th saw the advent of the dinosaurs, and 80 million years later on the 26th the first mammals arrived. They weren’t Adam and Eve. The dinosaurs never met the first humans because the dinosaurs became extinct on the 28th of December
Here we are, nearly at the end of the year and not until the 29th of December did the first primates arrive, or appear. On the 30th came the development of the frontal lobes of the brain in some primates and the first hominids appeared, accompanied here and there by giant mammals. Remember that these days last about 40 million of our current years.
Last day of the year at about 1:30 p.m. came Proconsul and Ramapithecus the probable ancestors of apes and men. Nine hours later came the first humans. By 11:00 p.m. some had learned to use stone tools. Bubbles in ice and crystals from this epoch show that there was a greater proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere than there is now. At about 11:46 Peking man had mastered the domestic use of fire. Those Chinese were first in so many things. Ten minutes after that was our most recent glacial period. At 11:58 some seafaring people settled in Australia. Europe’s first cave painting display was at 11:59.
So now we are examining the last minute of that eventful year. At 11:59:20 (the last figure being seconds), agriculture began to be practiced. Fifteen seconds later came the first cities of the New Stone Age era. At 11:59:50 we find Sumer and Egypt and the development of the knowledge of astronomy. Every second still equals about 500 current years.
The Lord Buddha was born around 11:59:55 and that era includes the first Ch’in Dynasty in China and the terracotta army, (See the movie Hero), and the wonders of the Athens of Pericles.
About one second later was the alleged birth of Jesus, the geometry of Euclid and the Roman Empire. That’s 11:59:56 p.m. Quite a bit further to go still.
At 11:59:57 Rome fell, as do all Empires and the Moslem conquests began. The most important event was the invention of Zero and the decimal system in Indian arithmetic.
At 11:59:58 we see the Crusades and the Mayan civilization with their amazing mathematics
At 11:59:59 we have the European voyages of discovery, including Columbus and Vasco da Gama, the destruction of several civilizations by the armies of Catholicism, and the first beginnings of experimental science during the Ming dynasty, once again in China.
And now in the very first second (500 years remember) of January 1st we have the tremendous increase in the discoveries of science and technology, including the means to destroy all life on Earth. Humans made their first tentative explorations of space and have begun to look for other intelligent life in outer space, probably because of its shortage here. Maybe the Battlestar Galactica people were right…it’s all happened before and it will all happen again.
Just about everything in our history books is in the last five seconds of the year representing the life of the universe. Some of those seemingly important kings and queens lasted less than a tenth of a second in our galactic year model. Very few people nowadays last one fifth of a second, a hundred years in our time. Why do we consider ourselves so important? Of course, if you consider that it has taken the universe 13.7 billion years to produce you then maybe there is more in you than meets the eye. Maybe just being cannon fodder or working for fifty years of your life for a tyrant is maybe not a good way to celebrate the enormity of the process that got you here. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind gargoyle. Happy Trails. Keep climbing.
