There's no way we measure time that makes sense
On the boundaries of infinity, extinctions and intelligence
We try to compute large numbers in the material sense of the world that we can understand or manipulate: time and money. We look at the comparison between multi-millionaires and billionaires, and we measure the difference in tangible items: X many houses purchased or assets owned, Y many yacht trips around the world, Q units fossil fuels burned and so forth. We make the money number with so many zeroes at the end make sense to us because we can see and experience, in almost real time, what the purchasing force of such zeroes can enact.
We say we understand that time and money are equivalent but objectively, they are not. Even if I assume that all humans are experiencing one second/one day at the same scale of cognitive load (i.e. emotional wrought, information processed and tasks executed), I would be wrong. Time numbers make no sense at all.
For example, maybe you could imagine the possession and use of 500 million dollars. But could you imagine 500 million years? Could you really do it? If you're imagining dinosaurs, you're wrong. They're only 66-ish million years old. Ferns first came into existence about 360 million years ago, and sharks (Elasmobranchii) are about 400 million years old. The Chambered Nautilus has maintained evolutionary stasis for 480 million years. Too bad it can’t tell you what’s changed since.
It is breaking my brain that there is a full-time job where professionals look at radioactive decay and be able to identify, label and now digitally fashion creatures out of the rock. We can identify the chemical composition of their waters, skies and bodies. We assign them names, genetic attributes so that we hope to track their lineage to descendants today. And it's made worse by the fact that only 7/8ths of the earth's geologic time can even be traced. How are we able to label the time when nearly 87% of life was extinguished from the planet (The Permian-Triassic extinction event) and not, for once, think of how life somehow still persisted?
How do I even begin with these numbers? Like I read the number, I look at all the zeros and my simple human brain cannot fathom what that even means. My brain goes brr. My brain says that such time might as well be in the realm of fantasy fiction. Math is supposed to be the ability to make abstract concrete, and it is failing me here. The numbers make no sense. I have no way to translate that time into some digestible, comparable piece of information that I can actually process. I barely process one year at a time well. I couldn't even process the last three. I've barely made it to my third decade. What does 300 million years even mean?
I don't know how y'all aren't standing at the edge of the abyss right now, because I definitely am.
As mammals in the Cenozoic epoch, we have the ability to build things that will far outlive us. Most of our plastics, on average, will take 400-ish years to fully decompose (which is why we try to now decompose them faster). Our digital existence is both an extension of life itself and yet, somehow, the most irrelevant attribute in the grand infinite scale of Life. If anything, we also spend a non-trivial fraction of our time searching out into space for similar intelligence. And I think we do it because we cannot be the only ones burdened/gifted with such cognition. Kind of like why I am writing this blog post. I can't be the only one sitting with the weight of this news. I am not recovering from the infinite.
But I think the weird(er) part is to discover that infinity does have boundaries. Life has survived on this planet despite nearly 5 boundary extinction events. We're grasping for immortality through language, art and our legacy. But consider if such a thing should live at least 60 million years. Would you want such immortality? We're able to look at our rocks and measure geologic time. We look at nautilus molluscs (which have remained in their evolutionary stasis for nearly 500), and we try to interpret what time must mean like. Perhaps the sane thing to do is to record simply the numbers and stop it from sinking you into the infinite.
Those creatures have no way to record time beside the existence of their lifespans, and maybe not even then. As the philosopher and ethicist Thom van Dooren points out, there are ways in which we humans and even contemporaneous species maintain evidence of the species we have lost. We use the word “dodo” to make the same sound a dead bird once used to make. There are plants still waiting to be pollinated by species of insects that have long since disappeared. There exists (allegedly) a whale that communicates exclusively at 52 Hertz, a frequency at which it cannot be heard or cannot be transmitted to by any other whale.
We believe we have language, a trait unique to humans. The thing that lets us assign names, the thing that lets us describe events in on-linear time and the thing that lets me show you how my brain is breaking in real time. Language is how we express cognition across ourselves. You know how much my brain is breaking, and if you reply to this email with words and symbols, my last functioning neuron will make a valiant effort to understand your cognitive framing as well.
Whale song, bird call and other animal sounds are capable of communicating complex information about predators, prey, climatic conditions, mating patterns or distress. But rarely do we know what creatures are thinking of unless we put electrodes in them. My last neuron is asking you what we must have lost in those 60-ish million year epochs. Whether there were languages or other complex cognitive models then. Whether they could have survived extinction events. Whether our search for intelligence in outer space or in the future is simply something we have already lost in the past.
Perhaps those of you made of stronger stuff are able to look at a rock, reimagine these extinct lives, and then go back to commuting and feeding the kids. Do you think about grasping for eternal immortality as you’re switching between apps? Do you think that there is any sense of control that we can (or that we even should) exert on the raw complex chemistry driving Life at the grand scale when we still have heartbreak, rejections and failures to manage on a personal scale? Does time or any measurement of it make sense to you?