A Final Thought: It Takes Time
By Mitch Allen
Time fascinates me. Is it a real thing or just a human concept? The division of the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds was something the Babylonians developed more than 5,000 years ago. Is 5,000 years a short time or a long time?
It’s relative.
When I think of woolly mammoths, I think of the last ice age, which ended about 11,500 years ago. When I think of the world’s oldest book, I recall The Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets in the cuneiform writing system in Mesopotamia.
These two things—woolly mammoths and books—don’t belong to the same era. I’m comfortable in that knowledge.
But I’m wrong.
The Epic of Gilgamesh was written about 4,000 years ago, the same time the last woolly mammoth succumbed to the sharp spear points of cold and hungry humans in the frigid Arctic. It’s hard to imagine mammoths roaming the earth when people were writing books.
Let’s go back further. As a dinosaur-obsessed kid, I loved to watch movies featuring a battle between a Stegosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex. But that never happened in reality. Steggy lived between 156 and 144 million years ago, while T. rex lived 67 to 65 million years ago. That means Tyrannosaurus rex is closer to humans in history than to Stegosaurus.
In fact, Steggy was already a fossil when T. rex came around—but Hollywood doesn’t care about that.
Speaking of fossils, on a trip to Arizona a couple of years ago, I bought a large chunk of coprolite from a gem and mineral shop. I’ve always wanted a quality specimen and splurged to buy it. Coprolite is typically petrified dinosaur poop. This piece had been sawn in half and the face polished in an effort to enhance its beauty. It didn’t help.
It still looks like crap.
When I showed it to my young grandsons, they each did something I did not expect. They smelled it. Chemically, it’s a 100 million-year-old rock, completely fossilized. But they didn’t grasp this concept. They wanted to know if it still smelled like the inside of a barn (assuming it came from an herbivore) or worse.
Yes, given enough time, everything stops stinking. Even our painful regrets, which seem so fresh, will one day no longer be malodorous.
Many of us recently raked our fall leaves, but imagine if you didn’t do it this year or anytime in the last 10 years. Your front yard would become a soft and nutrition-rich forest floor.
But what if you didn’t rake your leaves for millions of years?
First, if you had a swampy front yard, your fall leaves would transform into peat, which you could use to make a nice, earthy scotch. Then, a few million years later, heat and pressure would turn your peat into coal, which you could burn to heat your house. In a different environment, organic matter might fossilize into oil instead of coal.
This is why we call them “fossil fuels.”
Energy is energy; it simply takes on different forms over time. The leaves in our front yards grew from tender buds thanks to solar energy, which became trapped in the resulting coal. We like to dig up this coal and burn it to heat water, creating steam that turns a turbine, generating electricity to light a lamp—thus transforming it back into solar energy.
Through this process, we literally cause the sun to burn at night.
Time, it seems, can transform anything. Just ask my grandmother. Whenever I would mention an event that embarrassed me, hurt my feelings or rattled my teenage angst, she would say, “This, too, shall pass.”
And she was right; it always did.
And it always does.