The blink of an eye

We have been traveling through the mountains of Alaska and Washington and Montana the last few days, and I am suddenly acutely aware of how dynamic the earth is. Everywhere we look are the traces of miles-deep glaciers, great mountain-building upheavals, massive earthquakes, unimaginably huge floods, lava flows thousands of feet deep, great asteroid collisions, etc. etc. To those who will look, it is clear we humans live precariously on the surface of a restless, dynamic planet.

That the earth seems so stable to us that we happily build cities like Seattle in the shadow of an active volcano, or cities like Los Angeles right on top of a major earth fault, or seacoast cities like New York right where a tsunami can wipe them out, is a testament to how poorly we understand the planet we live on.

Of course people keep building in flood plains or on unstable mud hillsides or in the middle of flammable forests, and the government sometimes even helps them to rebuild when the inevitable disaster overtakes them. New Orleans comes to mind as a recent example.

I guess this is because, by nature’s time, our human lives are but a blink of an eye. Indeed, the entire life of our whole species to date is but the blink of an eye to most natural processes. That ought to keep us from getting too puffed up about our importance in the whole scheme of things.