The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden

      It’s About Time

      Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

      And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “Sonnet 18”

      It was a sunny Thursday morning. My wife, Margaret, was out playing badminton as she did most Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the winter months. So far, I had successfully arranged my meetings with Davey to coincide with her absence. I was not keen to have her questioning my sanity as a result of a sometimes loud conversation in my workroom with an invisible being.

      – You seem a little nervous, this morning, teacher.

      I had not said a word, but was sitting patiently at my computer, a cup of coffee in hand, reviewing the briefing notes I had prepared. If Davey could not see, but could only hear, how could he know I was feeling a little nervous? Furthermore it was hard to tell from his tone of voice if his addressing me as “teacher” was meant to be humorous and to set my mind at ease, or, to the contrary, as a sarcastic reference to my feeble efforts to explain something he already understood much better than I. Later on I would learn that he rarely if ever tried to embarrass me. It was almost certainly a failed attempt to relax me and get me laughing. Not knowing this yet, I bit my tongue and started in without further comment.

      – I vividly recall being told in school that a butterfly only lived for about twenty-four hours. In reality the lifetime of a butterfly varies substantially by species but is more likely to be about ten days.[18] Such a short time span for a life, even if preceded by a few weeks spent as a caterpillar preparing for the metamorphosis, seemed incomprehensible to me at the time. I could not begin to imagine how to pack a lifetime into one, or even ten, days.

      If I were to live for a hundred years, that would be about 3600 times longer than the ten-day life of an average butterfly. The human sense of time must clearly be very different from that of a butterfly, assuming it has any sense of time at all. Take another leap by a factor of 3600 beyond a hundred-year lifespan, and you get 360,000 years. Now that is quite a long time. If we look backward in time, it takes us well beyond the appearance of people like us (Homo sapiens), generally reckoned to have occurred about 160,000 years ago.[19] These time frames must be totally beyond the ken of a butterfly and put a severe stress on our own imagination. I look on my great-grandparents, only three generations older than I, as having lived quite a long way back in time. 160,000 years takes us back more than six thousand generations!

      The big dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex became extinct about 70 million years ago, or almost 440 times longer ago than the first appearance of Homo sapiens. As you have likely learned already, the first dinosaurs appeared quite late in the history of Earth, only about 230 million years ago. The first microfossil records of life on Earth date to about 3.45 billion years ago and are found in Apex chert (a variety of quartz) at Marble Bar in Western Australia. The fossil colonies are cyanobacteria (sometimes called blue-green algae), which built reefs. There are several other locations on Earth showing microfossils of a similar age.

      Taking yet another step back, the ages of Earth and the solar system of which it is a part, are thought to be just over 4.5 billion years, in a universe thought to have started with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Now there is some speculation about “other universes”. Although the term “universe” was originally meant to include absolutely everything, it seems quite reasonable to speculate that other universes may also have started with a Big Bang at other times, and may exist as entities completely inaccessible to us and probably unobservable by us.

      – Of course there are other universes! Do you still think I don’t exist?

      – Can you imagine me standing up at a conference of cosmologists and saying that I know there are other universes because I have been talking to a disembodied voice that hails from one?

      – As a matter of fact, I can imagine it. Indeed I have been conversing with someone who did just that!

      – And . . .?

      – You are right. He was not believed to be a credible witness.

      – I assume I need say no more.

      I said this rather too tartly, perhaps because I was guiltily aware that I had not answered his question. I had not yet fully settled in my mind whether or not Davey really existed, so I hastily picked up the thread of what I wanted to say.

      – The philosophies and belief systems of my forebears are strongly biased by their understanding of time as well as by their understanding (or lack of understanding) of the world around them. For example, it is much easier to believe that humankind is extra special, and generally above the rules that apply to other mammals and to other life forms if you believe that the universe was created only about six thousand years ago (i.e. long after the evolution of Homo sapiens), than if you believe that our universe is about 14 billion years old. In the absence of any strong evidence for one position or the other, one must expect that humans would be naturally biased to believe that they were special.

      I have thus found it helpful to learn about the gradual development of our understanding of time, not just because the history is interesting but also because it helps us to understand the origins of some of our belief systems.

      For by far the greatest part of the history of Homo sapiens, the boundaries of time measurement have been set by oral or written records, passed down to succeeding generations. Many, if not most, of our great philosophers and religious leaders lived and died long before we had the benefit of understanding the history of other species as recorded in the fossil beds (an understanding that roughly dates from the remarkable work of William Smith in the early 1800s in England), and without the detailed knowledge of the ages of rocks and some cherished human artifacts. It is only during my lifetime, with the discovery of radioactive dating techniques, and even more recently the finding that some changes in genes over time can be used to measure the passage of time, that humankind has been able to learn and to wonder at the vastness of time from a human perspective. Of course the findings of Charles Darwin and William Smith in the nineteenth century certainly provided strong indications that Earth might be a lot more than six thousand years old, but precise measurement of the age of most artifacts was simply not possible. Had the prophets of yore had that knowledge, and had they shared the insights available to people of my generation on the workings of the human brain, and of the power and complexities of evolutionary theory, their writings would surely have been very different. To begin with, they would have been much less likely to place man at the centre of the universe with a prestigious role as the most-beloved species watched over by an omniscient and omnipotent god.

      I have fallen heir to one of several family bibles passed down from clergyman ancestors. Like many old bibles, on the first page of Genesis, there is the annotation “Before Christ 4004” beside the opening text, which reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”. Behind this annotation lies a fascinating historical footnote.