One Million A.D. (collection)

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The concept of the “far future” is a relatively new one. Before you can conceive of a time millions of years from now, you first have to have a sense of a past that stretches millions of years behind us, an intuition into what has been called “deep time,” the kind of time, measured out in geological eras, in which mountains rise and fall, rock is laid down in patiently accumulating strata at the bottom of the sea before being thrust up into the air as naked new peaks, continents drift lazily around the globe, whole species of animals die, and new species evolve to replace them.

The idea of “deep time” didn’t really become part of the intellectual armory of the human species until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when thinkers such as Jean Louis Agassiz, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin began to challenge the church-sanctioned view that Creation had happened at 9:00 a.m. on October 26, 4004 B.C. (according to the calculations of Bishop Ussher in the seventeenth century), suggesting instead that the Earth was countless millions of years old, rather than a mere six thousand—a span of time so staggeringly huge, so dismayingly vast, that it is difficult for the human mind, used to measuring things on the Mayfly scale of our own eyeblink lives, to even grasp it.

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