Burning Violin #27 - Look On My Works

We like to think that we're immortal, that even if our bones turn to dust, something of us will live on. It's the demiurge, the spark of divinity that burns in each soul, the consuming desire to create. In Christian mythology, God stamped Adam's soul with that gift, but withheld it from the angels. Lucifer rebelled at that final indignity. The ember of creation drives our every impulse, whether to build a house, a career, a business, an empire, a theory, or a story. Even the least ambitious of us strive for eternity by creating children. There's a simple underlying faith to civilization, independent of any religion or agnosticism. Humanity is eternal, and therefore that which we create echoes in eternity.

If that myth fell, would civilization fall with it? It may have happened before.

The biosphere, the area in which life lives, ranges from about 8400 meters below sea level to 5400 above, a thickness of only eight and a half miles. If the Earth was a pool ball, the biosphere would be thinner than the pool ball's coating of paint. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid only six miles long. That's a dust mite pinging into our metaphorical pool ball. We can take some element of pride in our insignificance, like raging fans of a team that hasn't won in a decade but still keeps showing up to play with full stands.

But we haven't even begun to appreciate that we are not just small in size but in time. Our entire civilization has erupted from clever bald apes into space travelers in twenty thousand years or so, depending on where you draw the precise line between animal and civilization. Life has existed on Earth for around 3.6 billion years. If the history of life on Earth were projected into a 24 hour day, the entire history of our civilization would have taken place in the last half second. Half a second. Every tragedy and triumph, the rise and fall of every empire, a foot note at the end of our planet's day. If we annihilated ourselves in an orgy of atomic fire, how long would it take for us to be replaced? Even if we scoured every bit of life from land, even the cockroaches, it would be but a few seconds to the planet before some enterprising microbes flourished into clever beasts who built their own nuclear rockets. We comfort ourselves in some twisted way, imagine that those inevitable successors will wonder at our ruins, page through our decaying libraries, puzzle out some lesson from our self destruction. We imagine that we will live on as some ghost of a memory.

But the instruments and relics of technical society disintegrate at a far faster rate than geologic time. Toss a circuit board onto your lawn and watch it disintegrate day by day. In the twenty odd years since Chernobyl caused the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, nature has reclaimed the city despite the fallout. Soccer fields have become forests, libraries mere mulch for soil, winds and rain gradually pound even the concrete into dust. In another hundred years there will be little left but misshapen lumps of residual concrete and rusted iron. In a thousand? If we destroy ourselves, no one will wonder at our monuments, for they will have been dust for a thousand generations, subsumed into the soil and bedrock. No one will ever know we existed, save for a fossilized skeleton or two indistinguishable from those left by Cro-Magnon man.

There could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of technical societies predating us, leaving nothing behind to mark their passage. How did they disappear? The usual suspects, none of which would be detectable at a geologic distance. Even a nuclear war would be swallowed in a few million years by the planet. The fossil record reveals unimaginable mass extinctions at intervals of a few tens of millions of years. There is no evidence of prior technical civilizations, but we wouldn't expect to find any at a remove of eons.

Whether we are only the latest in a line of technical civilizations, or whether we are the first such to arise on this planet, certain conclusions become apparent with the realization of the sheer scale of time and space. First, we are only the latest living to haunt a vast and unmarked graveyard. Second, we must learn to think on a larger scale, if we are to survive and truly make our mark on eternity.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven