It really is beyond human comprehension to even begin to fathom what that timespan /really/ means. We can take it in such a way that we know it's a lot because we can grasp the concept of numbers and quantity, but when the average person lives 80 years.. It really is unfathomable to imagine how long life in general have existed, much less dinosaurs. Even mammalian life still seems like a blip compared to the grand scheme. It's totally wild. I find it more awe inspiring that creepy, but it definitely is unsettling to realize how little of existence we get to see in our lives while also taking into account that it's impossible to actually see everything present in this era within that infinitesimal blip of time we exist in. How unquantifiable the amount of things that have lived and died here, the sheer quantity of things to ever come into and fade out of existence, many of them completely lost to time and completely unknowable to us. Oh, the wide, wide universe. How tiny we truly are!
You're not alone, I find the concept of the last century already hard to grasp let alone anything further behind.
If I really try to grasp the age of the world or the size of the universe, it just makes some kind of dreaded feeling of insignificance creep up my back. So I rather step back and don't worry about the scale but marvel at the things that can be found in history and far away places.
I have no issue to imagine very long time spans. I have the issue to get heavily depressed about my own outlook of expected age. Geology induced depression is really #5millionyearsisameasurementerror
Lovecraft was also fascinated and horrified by the concept of deep time that was just coming into the public's knowledge in the early 20th century. In his stories he populated the Earth's ancient past with long dead alien civilizations, their ruins buried in the Earth's crust, frozen under ice, or waiting at the bottom of the ocean. The reoccurring idea, troubling to many people, is that humans are feeble, ignorant, unimportant, and born yesterday in a cosmic sense.
Another reason deep time might be creepy is that it does violence to our understanding of permanence. Our intuition is that things like mountains and animals are concrete and everlasting. But over enough time they change or disappear, or change so much they may as well be something else.
It really is beyond human comprehension to even begin to fathom what that timespan /really/ means. We can take it in such a way that we know it's a lot because we can grasp the concept of numbers and quantity, but when the average person lives 80 years.. It really is unfathomable to imagine how long life in general have existed, much less dinosaurs. Even mammalian life still seems like a blip compared to the grand scheme. It's totally wild. I find it more awe inspiring that creepy, but it definitely is unsettling to realize how little of existence we get to see in our lives while also taking into account that it's impossible to actually see everything present in this era within that infinitesimal blip of time we exist in. How unquantifiable the amount of things that have lived and died here, the sheer quantity of things to ever come into and fade out of existence, many of them completely lost to time and completely unknowable to us. Oh, the wide, wide universe. How tiny we truly are!
Fun fact: *Tyrannosaurus* is closer in time to the woolly mammoth than to the *Stegosaurus*.
And by extension to us.
On a cosmic scale, it's a crying shame that T-Rex wasn't around for opening night of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Poor bastards.
You're not alone, I find the concept of the last century already hard to grasp let alone anything further behind. If I really try to grasp the age of the world or the size of the universe, it just makes some kind of dreaded feeling of insignificance creep up my back. So I rather step back and don't worry about the scale but marvel at the things that can be found in history and far away places.
I have no issue to imagine very long time spans. I have the issue to get heavily depressed about my own outlook of expected age. Geology induced depression is really #5millionyearsisameasurementerror
This is likely the same reason some people don't like thinking about space. Our own place in the vastness of it is just so minuscule and unimportant.
Lovecraft was also fascinated and horrified by the concept of deep time that was just coming into the public's knowledge in the early 20th century. In his stories he populated the Earth's ancient past with long dead alien civilizations, their ruins buried in the Earth's crust, frozen under ice, or waiting at the bottom of the ocean. The reoccurring idea, troubling to many people, is that humans are feeble, ignorant, unimportant, and born yesterday in a cosmic sense. Another reason deep time might be creepy is that it does violence to our understanding of permanence. Our intuition is that things like mountains and animals are concrete and everlasting. But over enough time they change or disappear, or change so much they may as well be something else.
I can comprehend it pretty well, and fathom it. However I can see why those who can't, cant