There is nothing wrong in the textbook but the major perspectives be accommodated on paper, ” explains our teacher and leave the classroom.
”I’ll just get a timeline!”
return he has a rope with him. It is a long way. 27 feet and six inches to be exact and there he is. He says that there is a timeline of our universe, and he keeps up the tangle with outstretched arms. Contentedly. A bit like holding a nyförlöst heir to the throne, if you are a king in a fairy tale somewhere. Then you start it.
”Here, take the big bang.”
He puts the dawn of time in a small hand on the first bänkraden.
”Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, and on this timeline is every inch femhundratusen years.”
the labels along the rope, and now beth, he backwards while he the tangles of life unravel everything that has ever happened. In short strokes. He talks about the first stars that lit (0.4 meters) and how our galaxy, the Milky way begins to take shape in earnest (4 metres). He put the speed down against the wall, and crying out to each mile is five hundred million years while he rounds the kids on the last bänkraden. He is on his way back up towards the vanishing cabinet, and a completed lap around the class when he found our future home after at 18.4 metres.
”Now I have moved 9.2 billion years forward in time and here formed our favorite star, the sun. It is just an ordinary star with ordinary planets, but one day something unusual happen here.”
the couple of steps to find the unusual.
”We don’t know how but this happens in all cases. The unusual. It is here, for about 3.5 billion years ago, that the life on earth.”
he is back in front of the hand that squeezes the dawn of time, and he keeps up the last meter rope in front of us. More labels now.
He points out the first plants on land, 95 centimetres from the rope end.
80 cm left: the insects.
the 60-cm left: the reptilians.
48 centimeters remaining : DINOSAURS!
40 centimeters left: mammals.
13 centimeter left: the dinosaurs ‘ downfall.
he about us.
”It is hard to see where you are sitting but the whole of mankind’s history stretches over a half a millimeter at the end here.”
I look at my ruler and shudder.
A half a millimeter.
”Man has walked on the rope in three hundred thousand years, and there are about a half a millimeter. It means by the way that I, who, in the best case, will live for a hundred years, get a femtusendel of a millimeter on me. I would have to live my life fifty times to cross the width of a human hair at this scale. It is a bit spooky.”
We nod for it.
”But now I’ll tell you something kusligare. It was not just the dinosaurs that died out on the way here.”
the Earth is not our mother. No one watches over us.
his hand along the rope so that the phrases on the labels.
”Almost all species that ever lived on earth are extinct today. 99.9 percent have gone under. And it is not certain that the history of the us to be any longer than a half a millimeter. The rope might continue without us, lap after lap by a pointless universe. The earth is a ball-shaped cemetery on the operation in the dark.”
No, so he said not. He had no rope with them, either. The only timeline we saw was the one in the textbook.
the teacher had found on the sort of exercises, if he had made the effort to really marinate us in the perspective, perhaps we, as a child, had grasped that our smallness was not something we would grow out of. Perhaps we had cultivated a sense of responsibility for the species ‘ future. For even if the lesson was about was, of course, everything he told me true.
It has almost never been people. Yet we find it so difficult to be bottoming out in the illuminated story of ourselves, the one about evolution without a goal, and an art without a guardian. Despite all the overwhelming knowledge that we dug out of the sediment, it is difficult – also for a modern and full-grown human being – to shake off the young civilisation, the myths of our divine notability and the planet’s motherly instincts.
It is an internal tipping point we need to take us over.
our mom. No one watches over us. We are a thin layer of coincidences on a stone in the dark and we have almost never existed. And it would be natural for us to go under. Completely normal.
It is funny that, at times, we consider the dinosaurs as a loser in the evolutionary game when they, in fact, was a success. They walked on the earth for 180 million years.
the Dinosaurs were 36 centimetres on the rope. We can go in without passing a half a millimeter. Maybe that we will continue to consider ourselves as a kind of cosmological middle managers. It may of course not be excluded that something so far lågprofilerat essence with the overall responsibility to solve the climate crisis for us, but it is so little that speaks to it.
a key to human survival is the understanding of how small we are. Not only in the room but also in time. Perhaps just an evolutionary sommarkatt.
