Time and All That.

Recently, I had out my collection of 40 million year old extinct sharks teeth picked up off a beach called ‘Blind Jims’ at the main Te Whanga lagoon at Wharekauri, on the main island at the Chatham Islands.

The teeth are a steely blue colour, and slowly eroded out of a limestone outcrop nearby in the lagoon. (A lagoon, incidently, where one can walk about and pick up flounder with your hands).

By consulting a tome I have by Dr Hamish Campbell and others that is an intensive geology project to celebrate the bicentennial of the finding of the islands in 1791 by one of Captain George Vancouver’s ships (the Brig ‘Chatham’ that happened to have be blown off course and separated from the others), it is possible to find that the teeth are from either of two species of fossil sawsharks.

However, the main effect of seeing them and handling them, is what it does to one’s imagination.

Here are real teeth from sawsharks that really lived, … and now forty millions years on, how does one get a handle on such time…this singular frame of some giant movie?

Napolean Bonaparte has part of the answer. His driving of France to adopt a decimal system eased the convenience with which one could apply and imagine numbers. (18.7 x 10 nuclear bombs exploded at Mururoa I think it was).

Anyway, it so happens that there are a million millimetres in one kilometre, so I can immediately apply a distance which I CAN imagine to a vast time which I cannot directly imagine. We all of us being of a variety of ages, nevertheless, have some rough conception of the number of years that we have lived. By relating that small number of millimetres (in my case about 60mm) to the larger distance of 40 km, some reasonably accurate idea of the relative insignificance of our timespan can be conceived. Using this tool, one can then cast about and see, for instance, that the entire two million years of the ice ages (40 periods of cooling and heating) occupies a distance (2 km) roughly from Tryphena Wharf to Puriri Bay. Each of the 40 glacial/interglacial periods averaged 50,000 years or 50 metres. The last ice age finished around 10,000 years ago, (10 metres v ‘your age in mm’), and Maoris hauled their large ocean-going catamaran ships ashore just 800mm ago. Cook wandered past Cape Barrier a mere 235mm ago. There are variations within the imaginary toolbox to illuminate other scenarios of our never-boring world - for instance, if the sun was the size of a golf ball, the nearest star would be in Fiji, and it seems an atom has a similar ratio of empty space to its component parts. Carl Sagan said in his book ‘Billions and Billions,’… “If you know a thing only qualitatively, you know it no more than vaguely. If you know it quantitatively – grasping some numerical measure that distinguishes it from an infinite number of other possibilities – you are beginning to know it deeply. You comprehend some of its beauty… and the understanding it provides. Being afraid of quantification is tantamount to disenfranchising yourself, giving up on one of the most potent prospects for understanding and changing the world.”

Don Armitage © May, 2009.