No Concept of Time... - JosephBruceBustillos.com

This one popped up into my feed… I’d heard the one about how little time passed between the invention of powered flight and Apollo 11 landing on the moon, and thought that this was a very interesting presentation on how we think about the distance in time some things are to others and how poorly we imagine the whole scope of history. But he lists so many things in this very short video, and having just suffered over posting a poorly vetted video, I thought that it might be wise to look up all of these historical items he mentions to determine the veracity of his claims. And because I’m that kind of weirdo, I decided to put his twenty-two claims onto a spreadsheet to be able to get an overview of all the relationships between events that he mentions.

The huge stretch of time between some things, like between the extinction of the beloved Stegosaurus and emergence of the T-Rex, was surprising, and all those dinosaur movies that have the T-Rex squaring off with the herd of Stegosauruses are completely wrong. And who knew that the founding of Oxford came 400 years before the founding of the Aztec Empire (albeit on different continents, long before either was even aware of the other). We’re pretty ill-equipped to handle the concept of time, especially given how short human lifespans have historically been. It’s hard to grapple with the concept of 50 million years when the young among us think of 50 years as ancient and us “olds” barely can remember what day of the week it is.

So, of the twenty-two connections, I found errors or possible errors with five of the claims. The first possible error one might be just a matter of not being specific enough in his terminology, in that the gap between the end of the reign of Cleopatra to the introduction of the iPhone is about 2037 years, whereas it’s “only” 1449 years between the end of the construction of the pyramids and the beginning of Cleopatra’s reign. If the author meant the beginning of the construction of the pyramids, then, yeah, it was a shorter span of time from Cleopatra to the iPhone than from Cleopatra to the beginning of the construction of the pyramids (given that the construction took 1200 years..).

The next oops was the use of firearms by Medieval Knights and the Black Death, both of which happened the same year of 1346 and not the use of guns before the plague. Same slight error seems to have come up with the founding of Nintendo (September 23, 1989) being before the Eiffel Tower was built (construction ended March of 1889), I’m pretty sure March comes before September. And the last error was that Harriet Tubman died the same year Ronald Reagan was born, when she died in 1913 and Reagan was born in 1911. I don’t mean to pick on this video producer, his points are well presented, but it helps to double check sources sometimes.

But the point is that when we’re young we don’t think about time unless we feel like it’s moving too slowly and it just blazes by when you get older. When I taught sixth grade we played this game called generations to try to communicate our connection to time and to our ancestors, because I was teaching Social Studies that because with Australopithecine (ancient man) all the way to the Roman era. In the game, I lined everyone up in a huge line and the first person in the line represented everyone in the classroom and the person next to them represented their parents, and the person next to that person would be their parents-parents or grandparents. Each person represented a generation, guessing that it’s about 20-years from one generation to the next, how many “generations” do we go back to get back to the time of George Washington, maybe only eight kids back and we’re back in colonial days. How many generations would it take for us to get back to the Roman era? How many to the Egyptian First Dynasty? It can be a bit challenging for an 11-year old to imagine 1,000 years, or any human for that matter.

I have a picture of my mom’s folks from around the time they took a train from their town in Mexico to California, around 1918. They were very young with four little ones in tow (and a cousin). My mom (who was NOT in the picture) would be the youngest of 13, born in 1931. I’m the middle of five, born in 1958. It’s been 106 years since my grandparents took that picture, that’s just three generations. And I have two granddaughters, who are going to look at that picture some day from over 100 years ago and wonder who the hell were these people, why did they leave their town, what were they like, what was their world like, did they feel good about their lives when their time came? I guess that’s what it comes down to when it comes to understanding time: our lives are so limited that our best connections are through our parents and the stories they told us and the stories that we pass on to the next generation. And maybe we’re so bad at this because we didn’t listen when the stories were being told or we didn’t value what those old folks did or we were just too damn busy. The gap between the Stegosaurus and T-Rex, I can’t even begin to fathom. I get the hundred years between now and when my grandparents were young. With my Biblical Studies training I get the two-thousand years between now and early Christianity and then two-thousand years before that when someone decided to start writing things down. Anything before that is just stone and dust.