Deep Time, Social Technologies, and the Shifting Definitions of Life

The lecture explores the difficulties of positioning ourselves in time and the imagination, social practices, metaphors, and cultural tools required to understand time.
Time is viewed as a service that allows understanding of mid-19th-century contexts and the work of historians of science.

The standard scientific dating of the universe is approximately 14 billion years (13.7 billion).
This figure is subject to subtle changes, with a margin of error of about $200,000,000$ years on either end.
Scientists use radiation (radio waves) and mathematical equations related to the expanding universe and radio velocity to determine this age.

The Earth is estimated to be around 4.5 billion years old.
Fossils and the half-life of isotopes are used to date the Earth more accurately.
Life on Earth emerged after the formation of the Sun and the solar system.
The formation of the solar system involved the clustering of gases and dust over vast periods.

Defining when life began on Earth involves culturally laden and historically specific, socially constructed concepts with value-based actions.
A bare definition of life often revolves around self-sustaining biological processes. NASA and the National Institute of Health (NIH) define life as a chemical system capable of self-regulation (homeostasis) and Darwinian evolution.
Philosophical definitions of life vary across different intellectual traditions, questioning the divisions between sentience and insentience, animate and inanimate.
Critical histories of science and religion ask whether life should be defined by individual units or as a collective, considering the Earth as a complex living system.

The discussion questions whether life is an entity (a fundamental microbial unit) or a process.
The NASA definition includes both aspects: a chemically bounded, self-sustaining structure that is also reproducible and capable of Darwinian evolution.
Philosophers and scientists ponder whether life arises from non-life spontaneously or over time.
These questions are central to legal parameters of reproductive health, biomedical access, funding structures, and the legal context for health.

The threshold where non-life crosses into life is a complex question involving molecules, atoms, electrons, and chemistry.
Life arises at a particular moment from an aggregation of non-life, highlighting the culturally specific and contested nature of these definitions.

Empirical science, as pointed out by historians and philosophers, is culturally specific and driven by socially mediated concepts, communities, institutions, and language.
Questions arise regarding the possibility of creating life and intelligence through hardware, software, or wetware (brains), which are central to the imagination of technical futures driven by technocrats in Silicon Valley.
The conditions to support life on Earth could have existed about $4.3$ billion years ago, with evidence of life found around $3.7$ billion years ago.
Visualizing these vast timescales challenges human cognitive abilities and requires metaphors, linguistic tools, and visual aids.

Models of evolution and planetary life require social technologies.
Examples of social technologies include communication (speech), empathy, calendars, watches, words (decades), and narratives.
Calendars and units of time (years, months) are socially constructed and vary across cultures (lunar vs. solar calendars).
The starting point of counting time (e.g., 2025 in the Gregorian calendar) is culturally specific and differs in Buddhist, Islamic, and indigenous calendars.
Science itself is a social technology embedded in time, place, language, and community.

The invention of deep time in geology and biological evolutionism is a socially mediated metaphor full of history and story.
Concepts like calendars and clocks are laden with ideas about progress, direction, shape of time, and morality, leading to perceived conflicts between religion and science.

Donna Haraway reminds us that facts are theory-laden, meaning that the identification of patterns in data and the setup of experiments are influenced by theoretical contexts and goals.
Theories about life and the formation of microbial life are valuable, and values have histories and stories, framing our understanding within cultural and social expectations.
Social evolutionism, clothed in the language of evolutionary science, displayed racism and colonial outlook, positioning non-Western peoples as primitive on an evolutionary scale culminating in European civilization.

Stephen J. Gould's perspective on the invention of deep time helps critically approach geology as historians.
Deep time is connected with geology and the Darwinian evolutionary moment (1830s-1860s), during which new scientific models of vast timescales were widely debated.
The conflict between religion and science is a mischaracterization; the invention of deep time elevated two metaphors of time: time's arrow and time's cycle.

Time's arrow: Time moves forward perpetually from cause and effect in a linear, progress-driven fashion. Events are unique and conditions for new events.
Time's cycle: There is structure to the unfolding of events; it is predictable with laws and functions. This includes cyclical events.
Time is both linear and cyclical, having structure but also being potentially new and predictable.

Early geologists solidified new versions of history relying upon these two metaphors.
Thomas Burnett (late 17th-18th century) worked in natural philosophy, theorizing about the structure of the world a priori (knowledge derived prior to observation).
Burnett's "Sacred Theory of the Earth" attempted to align natural philosophy with Christian theology, elaborating on creationism and divine providence.
He sought a natural philosophy account to explain grand narratives like Noah's flood without appealing to miracles.
Burnett proposed a theory of a hollow earth to explain the flood, emphasizing cyclical time for the planet's evolution.

Burnett's visualization of time includes the creation story, the flood, the retreat of waters, and the eventual destruction and judgment day.
His language uses terms like "the great cycle of time and faith," framing planetary time and evolution as a morality tale with soteriological implications.
Burnett aimed to fit the creation story with natural philosophy and structure without divine intervention.

James Hutton (18th century) is considered the founder of modern geology for moving to a posteriori reasoning (knowledge derived after observation).
Hutton studied geologic structures and topographies, writing "Theory of the Earth."
Hutton directly engaged theological reckonings of the Earth's history, such as the 6,000-year timeline proposed by Archbishop James Usher.
Hutton looked at fossils and rock formations to come up with a biblical explanation.

Hutton's work laid the foundation for Charles Darwin's biological evolutionism.
Prior to Hutton, catastrophism explained geological differences through natural catastrophes like the biblical flood.
Hutton introduced the theory of renewal, where degradation and renewal processes change the landscape over time.