Big talk from a blip of a blip of a blip

If yoursquove seen a movie called Jurassic Park the rest of this column should be a breeze It also forms part of my humble diatribe about the absence of humility in our species and the towering arrogance with which we strut around As a sideshow yoursquoll learn the real meaning of ldquoOh my god am I late for the partyrdquoWhat does this have to do with Jurassic Park Besides being a memorable name for an exotic game park Jurassic refers to a specific time in this planetrsquos history As you might cleverly guess plenty of dinosaurs were around in the Jurassic PeriodGeology has always been a foggy thing for me For example Irsquom told our currently pathetic planet has been around for 4600000000 years Thatrsquos more zeroes than my brain can handle but it does seems like an awfully long timeI learned today that since 1961 the job of defining Earthrsquos time scale has been the day job of scientists at the International Union of Geological Sciences IUGN Since there were way too many zeroes they broke it up into smaller intervals each usually marked by some major happening such as an Ice Age or the appearance of fishI wonrsquot bore you with details and big words but herersquos what you need to know The IUGN broke up Earthrsquos 46 billion years into eons eras periods epochs and ages in that order For the last 4200 years wersquove been in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch in the Quaternary Period of the Cenozoic Era This falls within the Phanerozoic Eon which started about 541 million years ago With zeroes thatrsquos 541000000The only word you need to remember from that is HoloceneIf yoursquore wondering what all this has to do with the price of onions I urge patience The breaking news is that the IUGN wants to change Holocene to Anthropocene in recognition of the fact that for the first time humans not nature are changing the planet Starting from around 1950 they claim that humans have been messing with the planet what with the Industrial Revolution atomic bombs carbon emissions drilling and mining overfishing and all that other nasty stuffHumans deserve an epoch to themselves they claim because they are changing the planet just as dramatically as the asteroid that wiped out those poor dinosaurs after theyrsquod thrived for 164000000 yearsNature magazine calculated that the weight of everything manufactured by humans in 2020 garbage included was 11 teratons anthropogenic mass for the first time in history more than the combined mass of living beings biomass Our combined plastics are already twice as heavy as all the animals birdsand fish aliveIn July 2023 the International Commission on Stratigraphy announced the name We are now officially in the Anthropocene EpochNaturally therersquos fighting in the streets Some argue that human beings have an inflated sense of selfimportance and wrongly believe that they are masters of the universe To deserve a whole epoch named after them dissidents say humans should last millions of years like the dinosaurs did FYI Dinos lasted 164 million years and their extinction is still called an ldquoeventrdquoWersquove been around for a mere 300000 or so years Hardly any zeroes And it does look like wersquore on our way outldquoWho cares what itrsquos calledrdquo wrote a lay reader who goes by Claytronica in The Atlantic magazine ldquoWe are a pestilence A blight The cruellest joke is that we found ourselves at the top of the food chainrdquoMy species has a memory problem One of the most challenging concepts we struggle with daily is time If grandpa lives to be 100 thatrsquos already a long time Anything older than greatgrandfather is out of mind unrecorded traceless and ancientLooking at the universe through this small window only centuries wide we feel like bosses who have been around forever masters of all we survey but on the universersquos timeline wersquore the blip of a blip of a blip America considers itself old celebrating a trivial 400 years of recorded history while India and China feel ancient going on endlessly about their 5000 years of wisdom5000 yearsmdashthatrsquos about as much time as the average Patwardhan can wrap his mind around on this rock 4600000000 years oldTo appreciate our limitless hubris imagine a geological clock where 24 hours represents Earthrsquos 46 billion years Herersquos how events play outNothing happens for the first 12 hours except violent volcanoes thunder and lightning biblical floods and earthquakesBetween 1129 am and 103 pm cyanobacteria cells start creating oxygen making the planet habitable Life followsAll sorts of fantastic creatures evolve but get regularly wiped out without a trace in mass extinction eventsDinosaurs appear around 1048 pm but become extinct instantly in an asteroid strike at 1140 pm after ruling the Earth for 164 million yearsThe moments tick byWith four seconds to midnight something terrifying happens at 235907mdasha frail twolegged species with a devilish mind and a giant ego emerges Crowing about its greatness it goes on a rampage of killing plundering and annihilating the planetWelcome to the end of the party humansYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper