Earth, Humans, & Impact

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who hosts the show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey reports that the rock on which we humans live is about five billion earth years old. Try to imagine five billion of anything. When I was a young child, my Sunday school teacher told me that if I never, ever sinned, I'd go to Heaven where all my deceased relatives and beloved cats would be, and I'd live forever and ever and ever and ever. On occasion I'd force myself to stop long enough to think about what living forever in Heaven would be like. The thought of living, with no end in sight, with a bunch of old dead people and smashed cats--my cats always got run over in the street--scared the Dickens out of me.

Scare'n the Dickens Out of Me 

When I was a little girl, we lived at 16th and Broadway.

Mr. Dickens was an old, skinny, bent-over man with no teeth,

 and a long, filthy, scraggly beard, who would chase neighborhood kids

with a butterfly net. When he caught them, he'd take them inside his

dark, dingy, dirty home and eat them. It was the smallest children who

couldn't run fast who usually got caught. The bigger kids, like me, could

normally outrun Mr. Dickens, but, still the thought of being gnawed

on by such a disgusting-looking, toothless man was really scary.

Since I cannot not tell a lie--it's a human condition; everyone does it and if they tell you they don't they're lying--I no longer worry about living in Heaven in infinity. Now with Neil deGrasse Tyson's new show Cosmos, I have something else to worry about. 

According to Tyson, if the earth was created at 12:00 a.m. on January 1st, then we humans would not make an appearance until December 31st at 12:59:46. That's right. Humans have been living on earth for 14 seconds. If the Timeline pie chart for earth was a big yellow sphere depicting five billion years, then human existence of 14 seconds is shown by a tiny red dot just above the impact (also shown in red) that only a few seconds of human influence can create. I don't know about you but that scares the Dickens out of me.

Earth = 5,000,000 years old
Humans = 14 seconds old
Human impact = Scarey

In comparison, Mr. Dickens doesn't seem that scary.