Originally published at invisible druid. You can comment here or there.

A lot of people like to talk about things in reference to time. We folk in the paleo community get this all the time (and we make many unfunny jokes about it). People will say things like "we've been farming for a long long time" which is amusing since we (and anyone else who can count or who has read a science book) know that this is relatively speaking untrue. Sure, we've been farming for a long time compared to how old your Nanna is, but when compared to our stint as a species? Not so much. It's about 2% of our whole lifeline as a species. it's like saying that your grandmother was always in a nursing home just because she's been there for a year. But, of course, the vast majority of her life was spent elsewhere and all the best parts of it probably took place elsewhere. If humans were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all the great stuff happened before now and we have only been doing agriculture and living in cities since Willow and Kennedy hooked up. So not that great. If humans were Lost, then everyone would think that crappy ending was the whole deal.

But enough of that nerdy talk. I'm about to get nerdier. Because to judge life on earth based on how long our pathetic species has been here is absurd. We are literally a drop in the bucket of the history of the Earth. Want some proof?

What if the time line of the Earth were the Lord of the Rings Trilogy?

Let's say that the opening credits begin to roll and the day opens on Middle Earth. As we watch the armies of men and elves and dwarves fight the dark armies of Sauron the earth is busy getting solid and ejecting the moon off into space.

The hobbits leave the shire and travel to the world of men and meet Aragorn and all the while there is no life on earth. Life finally forms here on earth right around the time of the fight on Weathertop. Not multicelluar life. just ye olde proto-bacterium. the same "life" that gives you the sniffles.

By the the time Fellowship ends not much has changed. The Fellowship is broken, Boramir dies and all the while the flu is flitting around our planet. And that's it.

it's not till about an hour into the Two Towers that anything else happens. An hour. While Aragorn and Legolas are getting ready for the battle of Helm's Deep, oxygen finally begins to fill the atmosphere here. Yeah, that's right. Till now you would have died in seconds if you'd stumbled upon the planet because there was no oxygen. Suck on that.

Back in middle earth you've already gotten up to pee five times and you're out of your free refill of popcorn. You've been watching this series for five hours now when finally multicellular life begins, just as the Battle of Helm's Deep is ending. Toss me ... into a small patch of multicellular organisms. The Ents took way less time to decide to go to war than this evolution stuff took.

And I don't mean multicellular life like a dog or a horse. I mean 203 cells. Go outside and pick up the dedest looking rock you can find. That rock has life on it a thousand times more advanced than anything that was living on earth at this point. And bear in mind that this is just the Archean Eon. We're not even anywhere near what you think of as "prehistory" yet.

Just as the final credits for Two Towers finish rolling (and just as your bladder finally just gives up and dies) we see the first recognizable life anywhere on the whole planet. And it's fungus. Great.

Here's the great part. Just like the first hour of Return of the King, not much happens for a while in our geologic history after this. Right up until Aragorn intimidates the shit out of some undead and leads them out of their dirty cave. Right about when the movie picks up, so does life on earth. Why? Two things.

One is a little thing we call cnidarians. Those happened. Except you don't call them that, you call them jellyfish. Now, because I get to the next part, I want you to stop and think about where we are.

We are all the way at the climax of the whole series. There is a freaking war going on. And we just got jellyfish. You and me are nowhere in sight. The jellyfish walked into the theater just in time to see the best parts.

The second important thing is something called the Cambrian Explosion. This is basically the start of the Cambrian Era and was when evolution started happening like gangbusters. Boom. Why? There's a lot of theories ranging from extra oxygen in the atmosphere to the predator/prey model's inception to the earth cooling off and coming off a mass extinction ... we're not sure and probably all those theories are a little valid. But it happened and suddenly there were exciting things happening everywhere. In the next few minutes (by the time the mass battle scene is over) we'll see the rise of invertebrates and plants, the rise of predator and prey, lots of species rise and fall and Eowyn the Shield Maiden kills the Witch King of Angmar. Exciting times indeed. Sadly, unlike in the movie, there were no Oliphaunts yet.

Know what there isn't yet? People. Or even dinosaurs. That's right, we aren't even at the Flintstones yet.

The battle is over and with very little time left to go in the movie we see the rise of dinosaurs just as the one ring gets dropped into the fires of Mount Doom (spoiler alert). We see giant eagles carry Frodo and Sam off to their elvish honeymoon and just as Frodo wakes up there is a giant explosion of mass extinction and all the (non-avian) dinosaurs die.

Okay, that's fine. What happens after that? So people are all the rest of the long drawn out boring endings that go on and on and on? No, not so fast. Humans are around five hundred thousand years old. The Earth is around 4/5 billion years old. To be exact, we came into being with exactly 8 seconds left in this gigantic trilogy. We basically get to see the tail end of some midgets getting on a boat and then Sam finds the Red Book of Westmarch. That's us.

And this thing we do where we farm crops and live in cities? We like to call that the tail end of the credits. The part where they're thanking caterers (poetic). And this thing where we eat a lot of sugar and refined foods?

And that's being generous, because the real time, even on this expanded scale? Half a second.

Let's bear that in mind when you think you know what a long time is. We have no idea. Nobody does. You cannot imagine how long time really is, and neither can anyone else. Our brains are simply not big enough or expansive enough.

Oh, and just for reference, if you think THAT is a long time ... let's assume that you went to see this whole thing during one of those trilogy showings when Return of the King first opened. That means that when you got up to shower that morning, the big bang had probably just occurred. You could have seen this whole trilogy twice before the earth even got going.

Sometime soon, I'll look at the history of life since the Cambrian Explosion and talk about how truly long the time between mass extinction events were, but bear this in mind. There have been five massive gigantic extinction events since the advent of life. At least one of them killed 95% of all life on the planet. Only the very last one (that thing with the dinosaurs and the meteor) is on most anyone's radar. Life died and re-evolved and died again four times before that happened and we were not even a bare notion when the last one occurred. So maybe it's possible that we have no idea what they're talking about in the way that a hiccup doesn't know anything about philosophy.

The way Wayland the Smith went overboard designing these insane helmets was a great way of communicating his silent protest over being forced to build that ridiculous whopping robot thing.