How the Earth Was Made

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In his wonderful book "The Dragons of Eden," Carl Sagan compressed the history of the universe into a single year which he called the cosmic calendar which you can view here. On January 1 of the cosmic calendar, the Big Bang occurs. The Earth forms sometime on September 14th, and the earliest life forms follow nine days later. Humans make their first appearance on the cosmic calendar on Dec 31 ´round about 10:30 PM. They develop the first alphabet at 11:59 and 51 seconds.

Keeping this in mind, it´s only appropriate that in the History Channel documentary´ ninety-minute documentary "How the Earth was Made" Homo sapiens don´t make their debut until the 84-minute mark. Just think, in a documentary about the birth and development of our home planet, the human race only makes a cameo appearance at the very end. Even this would grossly overemphasize the relative importance of humanity to Earth except for the fact that the last few minutes of the program are dedicated to projecting a future in which a new ice age dawns and the Earth´s core eventually stops producing heat and slowly turns this pale blue dot into a dead ice-ball.

It´s staggering to think that the bulk of human civilization has occurred in a brief, atypical climactic period. Ice ages gripped the planet for the greater part of the last two million year, only retreating for good (at least to present day) a mere ten thousand years ago. Humans had existed in hunter-gatherer bands for a few hundred thousand years prior to this, but only right at the end of the last Ice Age did humans develop agriculture which, in turn, enabled them to develop the first cities and civilizations.

They won´t last long, not on the cosmic scale anyway. The climate that marks our entire civilized history is an exception to the rule. Manhattan was once frozen under glaciers twice as thick as the height of the Empire State Building, and it will happen again barring human intervention.

Cosmology can really blow your mind if you let yourself sink into it, but in some ways it´s also colossally boring. Imagine watching 4.5 billion years of Earth´s history all condensed into a 2-hour time-lapse program. You´d have your share of big Hollywood style explosion along the way: a massive volcanic eruption here, a life-extinguishing meteor strike there. But mostly it´s just a whole bunch of continental drift. A billion years ago, there was just one large continental mass called Rodinia; later they drifted apart then re-converged as Pangaea then decided to call it quits again and wound up where they are today, though of course a few hundred million years from now they´ll find their way back together again. It´s Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton but with a lot less scenery chewing.

"How the Earth Was Made" is a welcome no-nonsense documentary from the History Channel which sticks rigidly to the cosmic timeline with no New Age pseudo-philosophy or Nazi prophecies to distract from the proceedings. I guess when you´ve got 5 billion years to cover in an hour and a half, you pretty much have to stick to the basics. The program is produced by Stuart Carter, directed by Peter Chin, and narrated by the ubiquitous Edward Herrmann who, at this point, has to be considered one of the biggest cable TV stars that almost everyone has heard, but hardly anyone has heard of.

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