There is a concept in geology, paleontology, and other academic disciplines that study the ancient past called “deep time.”
Deep time seeks to conceptualize and re-create through the fossils, sedimentation and other geographical evidence what the world looked like in previous ages. The world we know today is vastly different than even 5,000 years ago as ruins from ancient Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia can attest. So just imagine what happens when we add an order of magnitude of 10 million, 100 million or a billion years to the equation? It becomes truly mind-boggling.
Deep time tells us that 66 million years ago, Alberta was largely subsumed by a shallow sea with monsters of unspeakable size and ferocity living within it. Just one thin sliver of western Alberta, the Yukon and British Columbia existed as a long thin continent which was populated by famous beasts like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Albertasaurus. It was hotter, wetter, filled with more vegetation than we even know today with a higher concentration of oxygen in the air.
It was also a world in jeopardy, even before the famous meteor strike came down and put the final nail in the coffin of the reign of the giant lizard creatures known as dinosaurs. Many eruptions of volcanoes all over the world were already straining life on Earth, and in North America, due to the higher oxygen content in the atmosphere, truly terrifying wildfires frequently ran roughshod over the ecosystem with uncontrollable fury.
Drop back another 400 million years in deep time, and the earth was a waterworld largely populated by various types of sea flora and fauna. Massive armoured fish called placoderms were the uncontested rulers of rivers and shallow oceans of this world. They bit down on their prey with the force exceeding a modern alligator’s, and, in place of teeth, dealt massive damage with jaws of ridged bone.
Meanwhile on land, the very first plants emerged from the depths to colonize the shores followed by the first creatures to walk on dry land as fully terrestrial beings.
Go back another 2.5 billion years back in time and Earth was filled with green oceans instead of blue. With no oxygen to speak of in the atmosphere, the iron and other chemicals in the ocean turned the water green. When the first oxygen producing bacteria arrived on the scene, (oxygen created as a waste byproduct of the consumption of carbon dioxide), almost all anaerobic life in the seas was destroyed, and the waters turned blood red as the iron within the waters and rock sediments underneath rusted.
The greatest value of thinking in deep time is it allows us all to appreciate how unlikely the world we know truly is, given the long odds against it existing in the first place. Maybe then we would then learn not to take it for granted.
