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First of all, many thanks to Arlo, who did a great job! In retrospect, I feel that my presentation was quite lame... I also have to add that I've always been into "deep time", and am writing a book on the subject of transmission of knowledge over human-scale deep time, which means tens of thousands of years, rather than millions of years. On a related note, Bharath notes that the "distinction between deep time and the ordinary time of our everyday experiences is not a recent discovery". This is quite true, and actually plays a part in the graduate seminar on landscape that I teach. I give the students a number of classical-period writings by authors who clearly understood that the Earth had a long geological history. For example:

• Hippolytus (an early Christian writer) in his Refutation of All Heresies, citing Xenophanes (ca. 580 - 478 B.C.):

Xenophanes thinks that a mixture of the earth with the sea is taking place, and that the earth in the course of time is being dissolved by the moisture; he states that he the following proofs: in the interior parts of the land and in mountains are found shells, and he says that in the stone-quarries at Syracuse were found imprints of a fish and of sea-weed, and in Paros the imprint of an anchovy in the depth of the stone, and in Melite… flat outlines of all and sundry sea-creatures. And he says that this came about when everything was "mudded" long ago, and that the imprint was fixed dry in the mud; all mankind is destroyed whenever the earth is brought down into the sea and has become mud, and then begins the process of birth all over again.

• Strabo Strabo (ca. 63 B.C. - ca. 25 A. D.) in his Geography:

Eratosthenes says further that this question in particular has presented a problem: how does it come about that large quantities of mussel-shells, oyster-shells, scallop-shells, and also salt-marshes are found in many places in the interior at a distance of two thousand or three thousand stadia [an ancient unit of measure] from the sea — for instance (to quote Eratosthenes) in the neighborhood of the temple of Ammon and along the road, three thousand stadia in length, that leads to it? At that place, he says, there is a large deposit of oyster-shells, and many beds of salt are still to be found there… [H]e praises the opinion of Xanthus, who says that… he himself had often seen, in many places, stones in the shape of a bivalve, shells of the pecten order, impressions of scallop-shells, and a salt-marsh, and therefore was persuaded that these plains were once sea… Now one may admit that a great part of the continents was once covered by water for certain periods and was then left bare again; and in the same way one may admit also that the whole surface of the earth now submerged is uneven, at the bottom of the sea, just as we might admit, of course that the part of the earth above water, on which we live, is subject to all the changes mentioned by Eratosthenes himself.

and finally...

• Herodotus (ca. 484 - ca.425 B.C.) in his Histories:

[2.11.1] Now in Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a gulf extending inland from the sea… whose length and width are such as I shall show: [2.11.2] in length, from its inner end out to the wide sea, it is a forty days' voyage for a ship rowed by oars; and in breadth, it is half a day's voyage at the widest. Every day the tides ebb and flow in it. [2.11.3] I believe that where Egypt is now, there was once another such gulf; this extended from the northern sea towards Aethiopia, and the other, the Arabian gulf of which I shall speak, extended from the south towards Syria; the ends of these gulfs penetrated into the country near each other, and but a little space of land separated them. [2.11.4] Now, if the Nile inclined to direct its current into this Arabian gulf, why should the latter not be silted up by it inside of twenty thousand years? In fact, I expect that it would be silted up inside of ten thousand years. Is it to be doubted, then, that in the ages before my birth a gulf even much greater than this should have been silted up by a river so great and so busy? [2.12.1] As for Egypt, then, I credit those who say it, and myself very much believe it to be the case; for I have seen that Egypt projects into the sea beyond the neighboring land, and shells are exposed to view on the mountains, and things are coated with salt, so that even the pyramids show it, and the only sandy mountain in Egypt is that which is above Memphis; [2.12.2] besides, Egypt is like neither the neighboring land of Arabia nor Libya, not even like Syria (for Syrians inhabit the seaboard of Arabia); it is a land of black and crumbling earth, as if it were alluvial deposit carried down the river from Aethiopia; [2.12.3] but we know that the soil of Libya is redder and somewhat sandy, and Arabia and Syria are lands of clay and stones.

In terms of human deep time, I noted the Atlantis story, which is just one of many where different cultures (in this case Egyptians and Greeks) debate how long their cultural memories are. Fiction deals with this theme as well, projecting communication across deep time and its challenges in a number of books, e.g., "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (a science fiction "must"). In terms of vastness generally, of which Anne gave a great visual example, one can also consider some of the works of Borges, e.g., "The Library of Babel", and "Funes the Memorius". In terms of our group discussion, I think that a key point made by Arlo and the group was how small human existence is in terms of scale compared to geological time. What can we take from this? Could one build a whole new school of philosophy, or even a religion on that fact? It would be interesting (OK, at least for me!) to think about? Also, since our general theme in the group is emergence, I think a further discussion of this idea of deep time and emergence is intriguing. Grobstein and I have debated about emergence for a while, with me saying that there is no way you can have emergence just arising out of randomness. But it would be worth considering if somehow just having a hell of a lot of time -- millions of years -- allows even the most "dormant" or disorganized or random of systems to give rise to pattern. Could time somehow actually be a (very, very subtle) force?

More later...