Will You Scientists Ever Learn?

A long time is a lot shorter than you thought

You hear a lot of know-it-alls these days talking about how this or that happened "in the blink of an eye in geologic time." For example, earlier this year, a pack of latte-drinking French anthropologists reported that they determined the age of some fossil junk they'd found under a rock in some really poor country to be as old as 7.2 million years. This, they contended, marked the discovery of our oldest ancestors, the first hominids to say "chimpanzees can bite me" before gathering their things and walking across the savanna, unlike their idiot cousins who could not gather anything because they needed all their wits about them for walking on all-fours, the dumb fucks.

Anyway, I hope those French-loving French scientists will have a great time on the Antiques Road Show finding out how much an australopithecene femur would be worth if it were put on auction today. That's not the point. The issue is that one day I'm going to be watching a dumbed-down television program (if you can imagine) about human origins in which the producers and writers will force Liev Schreiber to say, "7.2 million years might be an unimaginable amount of time to me and you, but to the Earth and French anthropologists, why, it's just a blink of an eye."

Is it, professor knows-a-lot? Do seven million years really add up to a geological blink of an eye, Mr. I-have-a-Phd-but-drive-a-19-year-old-hatchback? Because, let's face it, any time you science people want to impress on us nose-picking plebes the vast magnitude of a particular amount of time, your measurement of choice is always the solitary "blink of an eye." This is true whether you're talking about the last ice age that ended 10,000 years ago or the K-T event that killed the dinosaurs (and almost everything else) 65 million years ago.

That is quite a versatile yardstick, isn't it, Mr. I-wear-a-white-lab-coat-not-to-protect-me-from-chemicals-
but-to-cover-a-pizza-stain-I-got-eating-lunch-two-days-ago?
Well, I've got news that's going to knock your knee-high socks right off your studious legs. It's going to change the way we look at geology and time. And blinking. It will make string theory look like monism, and monism look like string cheese and string cheese look like the string section of an all-kazoo orchestra. I have, namely, discovered exactly how long a blink of an eye is in geologic time.

Who's holding the lazer-pointer now, Dr. I-have-no-idea-what-this-asshole-is-talking-about? (If you said me, you're correct.)

Let me explain, and try to follow the bouncing decimal point, if you can. See, the Googles says it takes me anywheres from 100 to 150 milliseconds to blink. That's a blink of an eye in geologic time. But it's also pretty quick when measured against the 75.29 years or 23,759,309,600 seconds that the CIA has given me to live. To find out exactly what that equivalent would be in Earth history, I compared ratios expressed as equatable fractions, dividing a human blink by my life expectancy, while dividing a geologic blink (x) by the current estimated age of the earth: 4.55 billion years or 54,600,000,000 months.

This is the same as saying ".15 seconds is to 23,759,309,600 seconds as x months is to 54,600,000,000 months."

The result was, to say the least, astonishing, if not flat-out wrong. Nevertheless, numbers don't lie, unless they're in big trouble, so according to my math, a blink of the eye in Earth's time is nowhere near 65 million years, or 7 million years, or even 10,000 years. It is, instead, precisely 10 days, 7 hours and 39 minutes.

Isn't that fantastic, Prof. I-surfed-away-from-this-site-ten-minutes-ago? You see how much better it is when our words actually mean something? After all, when we speak with greater precision, we make what we say that much more excruciating to our audience. Why should we smart people be the only ones to suffer?

And just imagine how much smarter we smart people would feel if Liev Schreiber, in narrating a documentary about the last ice age, were to read in his script "15,000 years ago might seem to you like a blink of an eye in geological terms, but to the earth, it's more like a day, so don't you feel stupid?"

Now imagine what he could do with that australopithecus script: "7.2 million years is a heck of long time, isn't it? You bet it's a long time. It's a really really long time. What did you think I was going to say, 'to the Earth, it's just about a year and two months?' You know what? I'm done entertaining you. I'm Liev Schreiber. I was in the remake of The Omen."

And finally, here's what he would say in a Discovery Channel special about dinosaurs: "I bet you're the kind of person who plays along with the contestants when you watch Jeopardy and you think that just because you get a few answers right, faster than the contestants, you would just kill on Jeopardy. But you would be wrong for at least three reasons I can think off the top of my head. First, the pressure on the contestants to respond is much higher than the pressure on you while you're lying on your couch, and that pressure has an impact on response times. Secondly, you're stoned, so you're most pressing concern for the next half-hour will be how to get the cheeze puff dust off your fingers. And lastly, you would have trouble distinguishing a noun from a verb on Wheel of Fortune. What makes you think you could even get past the door on Jeopardy?"