Time, Time...

... said old King Tut, is something I ain't got anything but (a quick nod here to Don Marquis and Mehitabel: if you don't know about them, Bush, let me know, and I'll catch you up one day.) Anyway, listen, I always find it interesting to watch how the mind gets around to what it needs to pay attention to on any given day. This morning, for example, mine was busy stewing over its long list of current woes for a full hour before it came to rest on what I had been watching the night before on the Discovery Channel: two programs, back to back, the first on asteroids and the second on the journey (sorry, Bush!) from ape to man.

The first of the two had to do with geological time, the billions of years of cosmic history, the formation of rocks and planetary features, the relationship of this planet we call home to the rest of the evolving universe, and the potential threat of wandering asteriods to the survival of our species. I was much moved by the story of Eugene Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, who had devoted their lives to this study: apparently, not long after a moment of culminating triumph, with the landing of a space probe on the surface of an asteroid in the late 1990s, Shoemaker was killed in a car accident in Australia while studying impact craters here on earth. Interviewed later, it seems in connection with the current television program, Carolyn reflected somberly that, in the context of geological time, we humans have been on this planet for only a very short time, and added poignantly that we have no certainty of being here very mugh longer, either.

The second program--your evolutionists and intelligent design freaks notwithstanding, Bush--traced the history of the development of the human species, working backwards from the discovery, in the mid 19th century, of Neanderthal remains dating back some four thousand years to more recent work identifying humanoid remains from as many as two million years ago! The scientific evidence allows of little doubt that humankind has been around a good while longer than the six thousand years allowed by the Bible story; and was somewhat more primitive in evolutionary terms than your Adam and Eve.

What came to me this morning was the fortuitous juxtaposition of these two different perspectives on time: for Carolyn Shoemaker, the cosmic scientist, those two million years of human history--such a vast span to those who studied human history and palentology--was no more than the blink of an eye. And there I was, this very morning, agonizing over the span of the past couple of months, and the next couple, in my own life. Suddenly my problems seemed to loom less large, my worries about money, real estate... Suddenly those feelings of frustration and depression that had been creeping up on me seemed a fraction less overwhelming, a fraction less vital to the well-being of the universe.

It may be a bit trite to suggest this, Bush, but would it not be worthwhile to take a look at your country and its business in this perspective, sometimes? To look at your war that way? Because the bigger news, surely, has to do with the planet, and its survival prospects, given the way we humans are abusing it. It's quite possible, certainly, given our propensities for self-destruction, that we may not be around for very much longer, as Carolyn Shoemaker suggests. Question is, will we leave a habitable planet behind us when we go? And, in the big context of the cosmos, with its supernovas, does it matter very much if we do? Food for thought, Bush, on this Monday morning. No?