05:22
Originally published on Tinyletter on August 15, 2020.
We like to measure things to scale. Maybe it's to remind ourselves of human exceptionalism as we track our rise to dominance against geologic history. Or perhaps it is the reverse: that to assuage our guilt over killing our gods, we have to be humble before the vastness of the universe.
One of my favorite Wikipedia pages is the Timeline of the Far Future. A sampling of anthropocentric hubris, some brave souls out there think they can plot out what happens next. Even then as they talk about the collapse of stars and decay of elements, they still try to cast bets on our survival, whatever form it may take. Humans—or our far, far descendants—may still have a 5% chance of not going extinct. We give ourselves too much credit. Just yesterday, I read that Arctic summer ice could disappear as early as 2035. Five years ago is already a complex scale to deal with, if those five years mean a series of life-altering events. I cannot even imagine what next week will look like.
At what could be the edge of our individual or collective existence, does it make sense to still talk about time? Not the intangible, elastic concept itself, but time as we apportion it every day. Time as we stretch it out to the many things we do or for the people we keep. How do we still conceive of time as a common blanket that covers us? Can we still talk as if there's not too much of it, and what about longing?
The apocalypse is not an event. It is a revelation, an uncovering. The world has suffered many, many deaths at our hands. But for every beginning I see and feel, I am returned to the present. We don't even have to talk about long moral arcs. To a large extent, we are ignorant of how the universe works. We only have to be honest with ourselves.
In the end, who will you be?