A small bright sparkle at the end of time

With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. Geologists live with the geologic scale. Individually, they may or may not be alarmed by the rate of exploitation of the things they discover, but, like the environmentalists, they use these repetitive analogies to place the human record in perspective – to see the Age of Reflection, the last few thousand years, as a small bright sparkle at the end of time.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 89