This is the eighth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode provides several ways to develop intuition about the brevity and temporary nature of modernity.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

Introduction

This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (intuitive timelines) as part of the process for putting modernity into context.

Epochs of Interest

Each of the perspectives in this video will involve the same set of ten key milestones or periods. Here is the list, with approximate times (no need to be super-precise).

1. The Big Bang; 13.8 billion years ago; the beginning of our universe, and time itself
2. Earth Formation; 4.5 billion years ago
3. The First Life; about 3.8 billion years ago (almost the same as previous)
4. The KT Impact; 66 million years ago; Chicxulub asteroid that took out dinosaurs
5. First Humans; 2.5–3 million years ago
6. Homo Sapiens; 250–300 thousand years ago; anatomically modern last 150,000 years
7. Agriculture; 10,000 years ago (thanks to the abnormal stability of the Holocene)
8. Science/Enlightenment; 400 years ago when we took greater control
9. Industrial/Fossil Fuel; 150 years when it really picked up steam
10. Ecocide; 50 years during which tremendous ecological damage has been done

I use “ecocide” as a shorthand label—admittedly provocative—for what appears to be our initiation of the sixth mass extinction, as addressed in the last episode.

I should say a few words about agriculture, since it marks a key departure from “normal” that becomes a focus of the comparisons to come. Agriculture is when humans began to exert more direct control over nature, deciding which plants and animals live or die in service of human ambitions. It was an experiment that changed the way humans lived and related to the rest of the community of life, inexorably connected to settlements, possessions, surplus, armies, cities, hierarchy, division of labor, subjugation of animals and humans, and a host of ecological damages (see an elaboration in the River post). Science intensified—and fossil fuels powered—a much greater degree of control. It is in this context that the following comparisons highlight the start of agriculture as the time when things changed suddenly and dramatically.

Intuitive Scales

In what follows, I present various comparisons of unimaginable stretches of time to more familiar scales. I offer multiple versions because I’m not sure which will really land, and it may be different for different people. Two involve time comparisons and two relate to distance (including a bonus not in the video). The point is to fit it all in our heads, intuitively, so I pick scales that we can better manage.

The longest time we can directly experience is a human lifetime, so that becomes the outer scale for time comparisons. In the distance domain, the farthest point away from you on Earth is on the opposite side of the globe, which is about 20,000 kilometers away. But to bring things into a more easily-visualized reality, I also use a moderately distant horizon (e.g., mountains).

Cancer Analogy Fails

Before the main comparisons get underway, let’s do a warmup. For a series named Metastatic Modernity, it would seem perfect to map to a cancer analogy, wherein agriculture was the first sign of disease, and the last century has seen the disease go global and metastatic (taking a crippling toll on biodiversity beyond the human progenitors).

The problem is, the analogy doesn’t really work. Modernity’s death spiral is far faster than that of cancer. Let’s look at why.

Because the ecological disease of the day is affecting the entire community of life (not just humans), one sensible timescale is the duration of all life on Earth. Comparing the lifetime of a cancer victim to the 3.8 billion years of life on Earth (one minute per century), we find that the cancer (agriculture analog) only appeared in the last hour or two of life (akin to a movie) and went metastatic in the last minute. So think about that: metastatic modernity is wickedly more sinister than any disease we know, when compared to the duration of life on Earth.

But maybe this is the wrong timescale. Perhaps more sensible would be the rebirth of life after the asteroid impact 66 million years ago. Present biodiversity had its start then, in a sense. Now comparing a 75-year-old person to 66 million years (one hour per century), cancer (agriculture) makes its first appearance 4 days before death and goes metastatic in the final hour. Actual cancer is again slow by comparison.

In order to get a more typical 6-month metastatic period, the cancer would be a nearly life-long 50 year episode, leaving very little “normal” pre-cancer time in the comparison—and thus failing to be a useful comparison. The truth is that any relevant ecological timescale (even with humans on the planet) stretches far longer than the agricultural period, so there’s no fitting way to map a cancer analog onto the far more rapid phenomenon of modernity.

DON’T PANIC

The four tables that follow are busy, but the left two columns are the same for each, mirroring the epochs laid out above. Bold lines indicate the starting point in each comparison. While you are welcome to study each table, the key points will be emphasized in a narrative that follows.

Human Lifetime

Humans have been on the planet for 2.5–3 million years in some form. Let’s equate that to a familiar human lifetime of 75 years, which produces a scale of each day in the life of our person corresponding to a century of time. (This is similar to a previous post called The Simple Story of Civilization.) The following table results.

Event	Time	Analog	Context
Universe	13.8 G		5000×
Earth	4.5 G		1500×
Life	3.8 G		1200×
KT Impact	66 M		20×
Humans	3 M	75 yr	lifetime
H. Sapiens	300 k	7 yr	retirement
Agriculture	10 k	100 dy	hobby/obsession
Science	400	4 dy	next-level
Fossil Fuels	150	36 hr	on steroids
Ecocide	50	12 hr	destructive crash

So, imagine the lifetime of an individual person representing the time that humans have been present on Earth. In parallel to humans on Earth, our comparison individual evolves and changes appearance over time, remaining essentially unchanged for the last few years. A short 15 weeks ago, this imagined person started doing something totally different—unlike anything in their first 75 years. Maybe it’s an obsession with weapons, recreational drugs, or skydiving. Whatever…something that could become risky or dangerous. This obsession brought about all new behaviors, new friends, new personality, and new lifestyle—leaving the person hardly recognizable. The analog here is agriculture: a whole new way of living on the planet that might go sideways and is cause for concern.

Four days ago this person amped-up their passion: maybe machine guns, cocaine, or cliff jumping: your level of worry shoots up. Now things are really cranking (science). But that wasn’t enough and yesterday morning they started dealing with bombs or wing suits: playing with deadly fire (that’s our fossil fuels and Industrial Revolution super-charging modernity’s schemes). We know where this leads: this morning the heavy machinery was put into practice with devastating results. The person destroyed their world, and it wasn’t hard to see it coming.

I want you to take a moment to let this sink in: picture a 75 year-old suddenly going off the rails after a living very different—even boring—lifestyle for all those years. You know what happens if you try to talk to them and convince them they’re doing something crazy or dangerous, right? “I’m fine. In fact, I’m more than fine! I’m great! I’ve never been better and never had so much fun! Don’t worry about me: I’ve got this under control. And by the way, mind your own business!” Except, you know better, don’t you? Such a sudden and destructive change!

Just as our subject clearly did something very stupid, so too is modernity making us do something insanely stupid: destroying the community of life that got us here.

Disastrous Exam Week

Okay: the last one was a bit anthropocentric, but usefully so, comparing an individual human lifetime to the relatively short time humans have been on Earth. In this next round, we’ll take the 66 million years that life has had to develop since the last mass extinction and compare it to a human lifetime. We still need some human tie to make this personally intuitive. A lifetime of 75 years translates to an hour per century (same as in the failed cancer analog).

Event	Time	Analog	Context
Universe	13.8 G		200×
Earth	4.5 G		70×
Life	3.8 G		60×
KT Impact	66 M	75 yr	lifetime
Humans	3 M	3.5 yr	college
H. Sapiens	300 k	4 mo	semester
Agriculture	10 k	4 dy	exam week
Science	400	4 hr	final exam
Fossil Fuels	150	90 min	midterm exam
Ecocide	50	30 min	pop quiz

I landed on an academic theme for this comparison. To a 75 year-old, what fraction of their life was spent in college? Or in a single semester? This is how much of the post-dinosaur era humans and Homo sapiens have occupied, respectively. Agriculture is like a single exam week: an abnormal period, and very short compared to 75 years. Science has only been around for the last four hours, and most of the ecological destruction has taken place in the last half-hour of this 75 year lifetime. Fast, right? I compare this last step to a pop quiz, which can seem as unwelcome and ruinous as ecocide.

The Farthest Possible

Let’s now shift to distance comparisons. This first one is a bonus, not in the video. We’ll tie the farthest you can go on Earth to the farthest one can go back in time (the Big Bang). A hand’s length (14 cm) is now a century. Here is the resulting table.

Event	Time	Analog	Context
Universe	13.8 G	20,000 km	Earth antipode
Earth	4.5 G	6,500 km	DC to Paris
Life	3.8 G	5,500 km	NYC to London
KT Impact	66 M	95 km	hour’s drive
Humans	3 M	4 km	hour’s walk
H. Sapiens	300 k	400 m	minute run
Agriculture	10 k	15 m	house
Science	400	60 cm	arm
Fossil Fuels	150	20 cm	head
Ecocide	50	7 cm	finger length

Each one of these contextual ties is reasonably intuitive, as relatable experiences. Now relative to the whole globe, the dinosaurs ended at the next city over, humans came up on the other side of town, Homo sapiens across a campus-sized space (mall?), agriculture is a single house (think how small this is relative to the globe!), and the recent stages that have utterly transformed the world are at a very personal scale.

This time, the mental exercise is to consider the farthest you’ve traveled, which will determine whether you’re dealing with the duration of the entire universe, just Earth or life, or some smaller portion. The Cambrian Explosion relates to 750 km, in case that helps bridge the gulf. So compared to the vast scale of your travels, all of what we tend to call modernity is “on your person.” Even the 10,000 year stretch of agriculture is something like your “personal space.”

Dinosaurs Across Campus!

A lot of people sleep while traveling, or might not look out the window much, and therefore may not have developed a meaningful sense for how far things really are on Earth. I still vividly remember the five-year-old-me sitting next to another pre-schooler in Tennessee, who pointed to Great Salt Lake on a map of the United States and insisted that it was her swimming pool. Knowing how interminably long it took to drive to much-nearer Florida (which I pronounced Flordida as a young’un), I objected: “I don’t think you realize how far away that is! You’d have to drive for days! Because we’re starting from way over here,” putting my finger on southeastern Tennessee. (I ask you: have I changed?). She said: “Yeah, it takes a long time to get there. My mommy drives like this”—at which point she began to trace with her finger a continent-scale spiral that converged on Great Salt Lake after about 4 cycles. I walked away. Hopeless. (I ask you: have people changed?)

To make this exercise more visceral, I’ll pull things down to a space one can see directly, all at once. Not every place in the world will have mountains visible on the horizon, but it is not uncommon to have a horizon some tens of kilometers away. Good enough. Making the convenient geological association of the 4.5 billion year old Earth to a 45 kilometer horizon gives us one millimeter per century.

Event	Time	Analog	Context
Universe	13.8 G	138 km	distant peak
Earth	4.5 G	45 km	horizon
Life	3.8 G	38 km	horizon
KT Impact	66 M	660 m	campus
Humans	3 M	30 m	building
H. Sapiens	300 k	3 m	office
Agriculture	10 k	10 cm	hand’s breadth
Science	400	4 mm	peppercorn
Fossil Fuels	150	1.5 mm	paperclip
Ecocide	50	0.5 mm	pencil lead

Depending on mountain ranges and sightlines, you might see a distant peak poking up all the way back to the Big Bang. The dinosaurs are on the opposite side of something the size of a typical campus (or a small town center). Humans occupy a building on the edge of campus (or a small grocery store on the edge of town), and Homo Sapiens is in the corner office. Then things get really small.

Now, picture yourself standing with a view of a distant horizon (or actually do it!), and bring your eyes toward the last mass extinction less than a kilometer away (0.4 miles)—where you can just make out the dinosaurs across campus. All humans are within talking distance, and all Homo sapiens could hear you whisper if the environment is quiet enough. Now look at the width of your hand and picture all of recorded history fitting on the second half of it (two of four fingers; the earlier half is the start of agriculture, cities, armies, etc.). The modern period is characterized by small objects held between thumb and index finger, down to the width of a mechanical pencil lead representing the period of dramatic ecological declines possibly marking a sixth mass extinction. Now look back at the last mass extinction event in the intermediate distance. The new one is so recent—so tiny. The whole story of going off the rails fits on your hand and makes you want to slap yourself.

Fireworks!

I recommend spending a little more time on at least one of the perspectives above. Reading through them is a start, but have you internalized and really come to terms with the scales involved?

Modernity is extremely new—whether relating to the duration of the universe, Earth, life, humans, or even Homo Sapiens. Most of our time on this planet was spent in a different mode that repeatedly and consistently failed to trigger ecocide.

As a brief tangent, some inevitably indicate that we’re no angels and have been ecologically destructive from the start by pointing to the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME). It’s a false equivalency for several reasons. First, more land mammal biomass has been lost in the last century than was lost across 50,000 years during the QME. Thus, the rate of biomass loss was about 1,000 times slower than what has happened in the last 50 years. Second, the QME was a consequence of human migration (as animals will do) into places where the megafauna had not co-evolved with humans, but with humans still “playing by the universal rules of life.” Megafauna fared better in Africa, where co-evolution took place. Third, once migrations were complete, the process essentially played itself out—and may even have resulted in the wise ways of Indigenous groups, having lived through a painful lesson.

The point is that we are living in a highly anomalous time period that is causing severe and rapid damage to ecological health, as was addressed in the previous episode.

I often have compared this period to a fireworks show: dazzling, unusual, and temporary. The sky conditions during a fireworks show make for a poor predictive model of weather conditions for the coming days, weeks, or months. Fireworks shows end—about as quickly as they began.

Conclusion and Do the Math

Next time, we’ll look at the recipe for disaster: how is it we managed to get to this unfortunate place? As usual, I encourage finding the companion write-up piece, which you have done (again?).

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