It’s five seconds to midnight...

So let me tell you about that extraordinary essay. Back in 1948 a man who studied economics in Yale and London was working for the forestry service in Pennsylvania. He had the perfect credentials to write a story which put me, you and the whole of humanity into context. Many have tried to re-tell it or put their own twist on it, but he was the genius who painted this vivid picture in my mind. He called it: ‘”But a Watch in the night”: A scientific fable’. His name was James C. Rettie. In it he talked of a fictional planet, Copernicus, created five billion or so years before the birth of our own Earth. And on that planet there was an intelligent species who learned the art of film-making. From their unique vantage-point, using time-lapsed cameras and super-powered telescopes, they made a film about the history of the Earth’s 757 million years up to that point. So a team from Copernicus arrive on Earth and show the movie at midnight on New Year’s Eve, and it plays continuously until midnight on 31 December – one year later. It plays at 24 pictures a second, 1,440 years per minute, 86,400 years per hour, two million years per day. What unfolds is an extraordinary account of the history of time, from the pre-Cambrian period and the advent of a living organism up to the present day. He describes the desolate months of January, February and March, with raging torrents, mountains melting and new ones thrusting upwards in seconds. The onset of April, and the first single-cell living organisms appear in warmer waters. By the end of May the first vertebrates are swimming in the oceans and by June, oil and gas deposits are forming. July sees the first land plants fighting against the constant erosion to gain a foothold – paving the way for land animals. Early August sees multitudes of fish appear in the seas and by September, crude lizards appear – the first amphibians. A few weeks later the dinosaurs arrive – lasting 140 million years before disappearing. Feathered creatures take to the air in October and animals who have babies who look like smaller versions of themselves emerge – the first mammals on Earth. Flowers, trees, insects arrive in November and a few weeks later mammals have taken control of animal life. December arrives and rivers are formed and mountains that we know today have risen up out of the sea.

By now the humans in the audience are beginning to wonder if the Copernicans have forgotten to include them, as right up to Christmas Day and beyond they still have not been mentioned. Then on 31 December, about twelve noon, a ‘stooped massive creature of man-like proportions’ is seen – Java Ape Man. He uses wooden clubs and crude stones for tools. Massive sheets of ice cover most of Europe, Asia and America. Woolly mammoths and Caribou fight for survival in the cold, inhospitable climate. It’s time for dinner on 31 December and still no sign of man. At 11.00pm Neanderthal man arrives, and at 11.30pm Cro-Magnon man – living in caves and drawing crude animals on the wall. A quarter to midnight sees Neolithic Man with sharper chip stone tools. At five or six minutes to midnight the Dawn of Civilisation unrolls and in the final fourth, third and second minute before the clock chimed midnight, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans made an appearance. At one minute and seventeen seconds to midnight the Christian era begins, Columbus discovers the New World at twenty seconds and in those final moments of time, human’s ‘swarm’ the planet. There is an important insight before the end of his essay, but I would encourage you to read it for yourself and make your own judgment. His sign-off: ‘We have just arrived upon this earth – how long will we stay?’

Squeezing the history of the world into this timescale makes me think about how precious and precarious life is. How unbelievably fortunate we are to live here, now, at this time on Earth. For me to move on in my infinitesimal life, I crunched it even more. I looked back on what I had done and how I had come to be me and I made a conscious decision to live differently. I encourage you to do the same. I want to be a speck in the next time-lapsed motion picture of Earth because I can be. For all the Richard’s who didn’t get to fulfil their potential and all the people who, through illness, disability or disadvantage, don’t get a choice to be who they want to be – I have to take this precious gift of health and life while I have it and be the best I can.

It’s five seconds to midnight...what’s your legacy going to be ??