The Universe is Full of Time

I think it’s very important for us, as a species, to remember how young we are.  Because we are.  We are so, so young.  In a universe whose major constituent structures move on the scale of millions of years, we have only been remotely aware of what’s going on around us for about a century.  And like an infant that has really just got its eyesight, we’re still struggling mightily to figure out what is going on.  We’ve made huge strides from where we were when we first blinked open our telescopes, and we’re learning fast, but there’s still so much we don’t know and can’t do because we’re just so new at knowing and doing.

 And the reason this is critical to keep in mind is that we have this tendency to try to grow up all at once.  Each of us has only eighty-odd years and so we want to know everything all at once, do everything all at once.  If there’s a chance it might be right, or a chance it might work, then caution be damned we’re going to try it, because we can.  And sometimes this can be good.  But we have to remember that we have so little time behind us, and so much before us – the universe is just full of time, it’s everywhere – if we can just take it easy and keep from ending ourselves just as we’re taking our first steps.  If we can keep from dropping an atomic bomb on ourselves.  If we can keep from creating a global climate we can’t survive in.  If we can keep from starting up an artificial intelligence whose power and nature we don’t understand.  Our species has been around for millions of years, and civilization for many thousands.  It’s likely that if we can just hold it together for even another five centuries – think how we’ve grown in the twentieth century alone – then we’ll make it out of our solar system and have dozens of worlds to learn from, to experiment with.  We’ll be bigger and smarter and more grown up, and if we trip or cut ourselves or fall into a puddle, it won’t be a big deal.  But if we fall into a puddle right now, we’ll drown.  And that will be the end of it – all those millions of years, all those billions of people, all those trillions of memories and stories we’ve made and the trillions more that would have followed – gone, erased forever.  And that would be a great loss to the cosmos, because even a single human life is a remarkable saga, and beyond that because the power and beauty and infinite mystery of the universe would also be forever lost, in a sense, without intelligent beings to see it.  And for all we know, we may be the only ones watching.