The idea that the surface of the earth consists of a bunch of rock "rafts" floating around on a hidden mantle, occasionally running into each other -- with some falling and others rising -- seems rather crazy. It took a lot of data to convince folks it was real.

Plate tectonics created a serious rift in the Geology community, with both supporters and detractors citing serious faults.

John McPhee's wonderful and Pulitzer-winning non-fiction natural history The Annals of the Former World about geology—specifically North American geology as exposed in highway road cuts!

This title which was collects a series of books originally published in series and only collected in a single volume subsequently,

happened to have been written over the years during which plate tectonic theory was still being fiercely debated, indeed some of the characters contested it.

By that happy accident the book is thus simultaneously several things:

- a marvelous natural history of the United States revealed through characteristically engaging and evocative personal narratives

- a look at North American geology which over the course of the books collected is increasingly revealed

- a very effective communication of what geological _deep time_ really means, and

- a fascinating look into the inner workings of scientific inquiry and discourse: messy, passionate, exquisite, invaluable

Of particular local interest is the must-read Assembling California, the final book collected, which contains a duly famous second by second account of how the Loma Prieta earthquake went down.

A nice introduction:

https://californiacurated.com/2024/09/06/looking-back-john-m...

I think humans have a coping mechanism to find some beauty in things they're forced to participate in, good or bad.

Maybe there's some small edge of anti-fragility in that -- we seem more willing to confront beauty and inspect its contours

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water” - and a renewable resource too if we don’t screw things up.

I share your worries though.

There is also a sort of blindness to the same sort of processes Hyde is quite reasonably (and evocatively) gobsmacked by: if Darwin could be said to have invented a sort of integral Calculus to grapple with deep time, a differential version is just as needed to look at changes in the rate at which the rate at which changes are changing, and perhaps on to even higher derivatives.

Too many of these melancholy (or as you say, nihilistic) takes are rooted in a model of the form "we are here, now, and if things go on as they have been will inevitably wind up there, by then" and fail to acknowledge that things are not going to "go on like they have been". Things are changing, but the rate, manner and even direction of changes are also changing, and we need to recognize that as well.

> Every single one of us needs to wake the fuck up.

And how do you plan to achieve that ? The denial of reality of human psychology and politics is one of the reasons denial of climate change is still rampant. Yelling at people with urgency only works that much, and it also amplifies resistance.

In the end, everyone needs to wake the fuck up implies a sheer resolution of the need for change, and you won't bring that by schooling people, yelling at them or even violence. The inevitable is there, do what you think is best, tell what you think is best and you'll probably have maximized your contribution already.

Contemplating how things plays out in the end is not nihilistic, it's a form of acceptance of the real hard truth about the grip we have, as individuals, on the mater.

Google Earth Timelapse is a great tool to visualize our world in different scales of space and time: https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/

This story was so unexpectedly emotional. I'd never read a book where I so palpably felt that the main characters were in fact the non-conscious ones.

Somebody told me that in the Tibetan culture, partly because of the centrality of belief in reincarnation, they often think on timescales of thousands of years