Some thoughts on the scales of time and space

Who paid for World War II?

Plastics are entering the geological record. In a few hundred million years, some future geologists will probably be able to read the fossil remains of the odd cd or two, incorporated into the rock.

Most petroleum reserves started 300 - 400 million years ago, when our ancestors were just gaining the ability to lay their eggs on land instead of in the water. The oldest reserves, however, date back to a time when our ancestors, tiny little ocean creatures, were diverging from the ancestors of the insects.

It is probably the case that some of the petroleum and natural gas we burn today consists, in part, of the direct remains of our ancestors.

Cheap oil, and the internet: these are the decades of maximum wealth.

The earth is in between ice ages. The next one will be in a few tens of thousands of years. In the midst of the last one, we won the great Cro Magnon/Neanderthal smackdown.

The sun will steadily increase in brightness over the next few billion years. A billion years from now, the oceans will have evaporated away and the whole planet will become a desert, completely sterilized of life. Life has existed on earth for 3.5 billion years, and it has no more than 1 billion more years to go.