There's Still Time Enough

"It's wrong to think that the past is something that’s just gone. It’s still there. It’s just that *you’ve* gone past." - Terry Pratchett

I’m sending this newsletter out just after 10pm.

According to Carl Sagan’s famous cosmic calendar (first outlined in his 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden): if you think of the entire history of the universe represented by the year that’s almost passed, it's only at 10.30pm on New Year’s Eve that human beings first arrive on the scene.

That’s in fifteen minutes, so we don’t even exist yet. What a very odd thought.

(It’s even odder if you define “human” as “a member of the subspecies Homo Sapiens Sapiens” because then we only pop up at 11.58pm - barely enough time to fling off our coats and grab a glass of warm Prosecco.)

I have no idea how all this makes you feel. Giddy? Horrified? Riddled with existential vertigo?

Perhaps you’re in awe of just how long we’ve been around!

This haunts me. Everything but the most recent sliver of human history (just a half-dozen millennia out of hundreds) is an ongoing mystery. All those people, more or less just like us, living their lives! Blimey. Who were they, beyond the fragmentary traces they’ve left for us? What were they thinking? It’s impossible to say (but enormous fun to speculate about - just ask any archaeologist).

Perhaps you need a drink now. Well, I guess this is a good night for it?

What I mostly feel is three things:

• Mortification, because when I excitedly posted this on my social media accounts earlier today, I incorrectly wrote “think of the entire history of the Earth represented by the year that’s almost passed” - and I didn’t spot this error for at least 20 minutes. Egg meets face. I mean, I have actual scientists following me on there. This is not the way I wanted to start 2026.

• A second bout of awe, when I realised the Earth only makes its appearance around 70% of the way through that list, seven-tenths of this epic Story So Far already being over - and even if I adjusted this Cosmic Calendar into a version solely featuring the Earth, we’d still only be making our first appearance after 11.30pm tonight.

• Oddly comforted.

I know the last of these isn’t the standard reaction. It’s certainly not what 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton encountered when he laid out his revolutionary argument for an immensely older Earth than was currently believed. When he said of our world that “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end,” he knew how uncomfortable an idea it could be. To contemplate time and space on such a scale tests your sanity.

But I reckon human beings need two things to spiritually ground themselves: they need to feel special, and they need to feel part of something greater.

If you’re searching for a bit more of the latter at this time of year, I reckon you can’t go wrong by humbling yourself in front of Deep Time, just to see what it does to various parts of you.

(Especially your knees.)

I like this feeling: to put on a warm coat and hat and gloves, and go for a walk somewhere cold & quiet, feeling the vastness of everything around me and then imagining all of it stretching backwards in time, far beyond my shrinking-to-nothing lifespan, so far that I completely vanish. I’m suddenly an event so fleeting that even a single frame in a movie hasn’t the slightest chance of capturing it.

Here I am, feeling and experiencing plenty, and yet compared with how much more there is, and how much more there has ever been and will ever be…?

Brrr.

Contemplating deep time can do this to everything and everyone.

It also does it to everywhere. As I wrote here, more or less everywhere on the surface of our planet has been more or less everywhere - and it only looks this solid and reassuringly unchanging because we live so damn quickly.

Zoom out far enough (which on the wider scale of deep time can still be absolutely nowhere) and we flicker and vanish.

But despite all that, we do seem to be here - and what a thing that is.

In a 46.5 billion light-year observable universe that itself is only part of something that may even be infinitely (!) greater, in this fraction of an inkling of a moment that will barely have happened in the long run, here we all are together, with this ability to look out, and look back, and cast our imaginations in all sorts of directions - until maybe we can start to see just the tiniest part of what’s really going on around us, as we hunt for a whisper of a hint how it all fits together…

Yeah. I’m definitely up for another twelve months of that.

Happy new year, everyone - and here’s to another year of being part of this amazing story.

- Mike

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Image: Genevieve Dallaire.