Archaeology, Time, and Small Brains

We just did the Cosmic Calendar in astronomy which is a great tool (Thanks, Carl!) to help conceptualize the enormous yet finite amount of time the Universe has been around.  I love emphasizing to students what a small blip our entire history as a species in the Universe is (last few mins of Dec 31).

I feel I have a really good handle on this small-in-time stuff, but just the other day I read a book review on a new book about Uruk, considered the world’s first city (part of the society that originated the base-60 number system that eventually gave us 360 degrees in a circle).  I was blown away by the line that the archaeological dig is complicated by the fact that Uruk spanned “more than 4500 years of urban history”.

Here is an entire dead and long-gone city that was a living, bustling metropolis for longer than all of recorded history (which begins around that time, in that place, ~3300 BCE).  I felt a real ceiling on my imagination.

Rome, considered the oldest European city, has only been around for about 2,800 years.  

I feel like Boston and New York have been here forever, but they are less than 400 years old.  If my intuition of what is old is so bad at these small time scales, what hope do I have when faced with the history of the Universe?  

Maybe the Cosmic Calendar gives me a false sense of understanding?  A way of thinking “I know what a year is and, so, if I map out 13.7 billion years onto one year, I will gain some insight.”  But, really, if a few seconds is longer than Uruk’s entire existence and that feels like an infinite amount of time to me, what hope do I have when contemplating 13.7 billion year history of the Universe?

Wishing I had more “big brains” as the kids say these days…