There is nothing like a little drive time through the rolling foothills to notice that the earth has been around a long time. A really long, long, long time. Roads cut throught the sides of these hills expose the ages of the rocks showing layer upon layer. I don't have the layers memorized, but I can appreciate how long the layers have to be on the surface, then undergo some atmospheric change, then get buried for a new surface to be layered on top, then that surface gets buried with time, and so on. It takes my mind a little while to go back in time with each of the layers. It would take thousands of years for the what's on the surface, maybe tens of thousands of years. If I look at the lowest layer it could represent hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years.
Then I look at my own few decades of life here on the earth. It seems that If the earth could sneeze for the same one second that I sneeze, my life would be over. The ancients on the earth liked to use the analogy of life being a vapor and then gone. When I'm gone, my bones return to dust, get buried with the rest of the surface for that ten thousand year era, then continue to compress with each ensuing surface of the crust and get further down in the layers. If people did go extinct somewhere in thefuture, then whoever might see the earth after that would never know that billions and billions of the species of humans filled this teeming earth.
There's a great poem called Ozymandias that expresses the sentiment I just mused about in prose form. Its text is below.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
(Percy Shelley, 1818)
Thoughts like these don't argue well for a creator. Why should someone care when years from now, my remains will not really speak from the dust. They'll be part of a layer of earth buried 100,000 years down. Then again, that could be why there is an after-life. We don't have to remain buried 100,000 years down. Some part of us lives on past the sands revealing a colossal wreck. And that appeals to my thirsty soul.
Then I look at my own few decades of life here on the earth. It seems that If the earth could sneeze for the same one second that I sneeze, my life would be over. The ancients on the earth liked to use the analogy of life being a vapor and then gone. When I'm gone, my bones return to dust, get buried with the rest of the surface for that ten thousand year era, then continue to compress with each ensuing surface of the crust and get further down in the layers. If people did go extinct somewhere in thefuture, then whoever might see the earth after that would never know that billions and billions of the species of humans filled this teeming earth.
There's a great poem called Ozymandias that expresses the sentiment I just mused about in prose form. Its text is below.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
'Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
(Percy Shelley, 1818)
Thoughts like these don't argue well for a creator. Why should someone care when years from now, my remains will not really speak from the dust. They'll be part of a layer of earth buried 100,000 years down. Then again, that could be why there is an after-life. We don't have to remain buried 100,000 years down. Some part of us lives on past the sands revealing a colossal wreck. And that appeals to my thirsty soul.
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