A Short History, Part II

As I'm learning through reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, it's become painfully, anxiously apparent that I am an Expectant Catastrophist. Not the kind of Catastrophist Bill Bryson who wrote the book talks about in regard to the two school of thought regarding the demise of the dinosaurs, but rather, the kind of Catastrophist who, upon reading how in the last 4.53 billion years of life on Earth, humankind has only existed a fraction of a fraction of 1% of that time. It seems to me that whether he's talking cosmology, quantum physics, biology, geology, meteorology, or evolution, we're all just basically fucked as a race. From the looming doom of impending, uncharted asteroids hurling into earth without notice to the uncharted, hyper-catastrophic impending eruption of Yellowstone National Park (because I'm sure everyone knew except me that Yellowstone is basically a 40-mile in diameter volcano that's due to explode in such a way as to bury Manhattan under 500-feet of ash) I've simply resigned myself that homo sapiens tenure on Earth is statistically irrelevant in the course of the long history of the Universe. And not sort of statistically irrelevant but MAD CHEDDAR irrelevant. Read Bryson's excerpt as he explains if you compared the total history of the Earth in terms of a 24-hour clock, life or something like it first appeared somewhere in the late afternoon and human-kind as we know ourselves is like somewhere around 11:59:59. The sky is falling the sky is falling, I say!