Grappling With Father Time

While I was down there in the Amazon jungle, we pretty much all adopted the "siesta" lifestyle and the middle of the hot sweaty afternoons were spent by most of us laying about the place in hammocks.
But, one afternoon I wasnt really feeling sleepy, so I decided to go for a quiet paddle in the small dugout canoe.

So, with the carved wooden paddle in hand, I pushed off from the little dock and proceeded to amble my aquatic way around the lagoon... Its an "ox-bow" of the river that has been bypassed by the main flow of the river and so it is calm and still rather than the swift current of the main river.
And I paddled about quite happily for an hour or so... Trying to master the art of the absolutely silent paddle stroke, looking closely at all the river-side plants and listening to the jungle "do its thing" without any human made noises at all....ahhhh :)



And while I was doing that; If I didnt look at the simple cotton clothes that I was wearing (T-shirt and shorts made by machines) then I could look around and see absolutely nothing that was at all "modern"... No evidence of man whatsoever...no plastic, no metal, and no huts or clearings at all... No smells, no sounds... I may as well have been a primitive tribesman from thousands of years ago, paddling around looking for my next meal or something! The paddle, the canoe, the jungle, the river, the sky, my bare limbs, and my "awareness"... Just me and the jungle!

... And that was very interesting... In fact, I was almost compelled to think, "This" is what this jungle is "used to" as far as humans and "our place in the scheme of things" are concerned"... The modern humans (that I am one of) with their metals, synthetics and machines are really a very recent phenomenon as far as the jungles time scales are concerned... Weve only been destroying the place for a few hundred years or so.
And that led me to wonder how long this jungle has been around for in roughly its current form... Must be many thousands of years... Id guess that not long after the current ice-age got under way and the oceans retreated...

The current Ice-Age is about 30 thousand years old...
Actually we are rather over due for the ice-caps to melt and sea levels to rise again! according to the Ice-Age clock... Which is very regular you know... It cycles at about every 100,000 years or so.
But, back to the plot...

So, at a rough guess, this Jungle that Im paddling around in and imagining myself as a primitive tribesman in, has been "as it is" for probably about 25000 years!
But, I thought to my self, thats not long enough for all the speciation to have occurred... It took a lot longer than that, so clearly the diversity of all the plants and animals in this jungle is "trans-glaciation"... It must have come through the ice-ages/interglacial periods so to speak...
So, how long did it take to "create" this much biodiversity?
Well, Im hardly qualified to answer that but Id guess that its from several (and probably many) millions of years of evolution...

And that got me thinking, "Well, thats easy to say, but what does a million years feel like?"
I mean, we bandy that number about all over the place these days but how many of us actually have any concept of how long a million years really is?
And so, I thought that quite obviously the largest time that I have experienced is of course my "whole life" of about 45 years... But then I immediately thought that to keep it simple Id expand that to the maximum reasonable life of a person of say 100 years...

Now, I know for myself that sometimes, life feels veeeeerrrry long... Im sure you know what I mean.. Im only in my fourties, and I can hardly remember most of my childhood... Its all just vague and blurry with the odd highlight moment etched in my memory. And imagining forward I can really only conceive of things (in any sort of personal way) a few decades into the future...Its just the limits of my experience :)

So, to my little human awareness, a hundred years is an incredibly long time and its really beyond my capacity to conceive of things in a personal way that are beyond that sort of time span... But if the jungle has been doing its thing here through the "seasons" of the ice-ages for even only one million years then the simple mathematics says that a million years is "Ten Thousand human lifetimes" !!!

Now thats a VERY long time!!

That gives me some perspective on the scale of a million years and how things might look to this jungle if it was an entity and had a "perspective" !!