Our intuitions remain grounded in lives that last a century, tops. Even accepting it as reality helps little in appreciating the detail. The expansion of Earth history to millions, then – as we now know – thousands of millions of years, was like a rift valley in the culture: abrupt, unsettling, opening up vistas that were hard to take in. You couldn’t say we are accustomed to it, though. In the west, many were wedded to a biblical history that reckoned the age of the Earth in thousands of years. The notion is now familiar from cosmology as well as planetary ages. “Deep time”, the abyssal fourth dimension first unveiled by Victorian geologists, underlay Darwin’s theorising. Yet the largely undepicted past is vast indeed.
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