Biking to the post office today, the sky was filled with so many snow geese it was hard to stay on the road. Honk! Honk! Honk! It’s hard to pedal straight when you’re eyes are looking up at all the snow geese. Flocks of swan were flying too.

Which brings to mind what an amazing planet we live on. What makes it so amazing is the length of time it has taken for us to get to this point. Today on Skunk Bear, Adam Cole, using the length of a football field, illustrated just how long it has taken for much of the life we take for granted to evolve. If we take a hundred yard football field to represent the 4.5 billion years the earth has been around, and start walking at one end, many of the creatures we know and love don’t appear until the last yard at the other end, and we humans don’t appear until the last eighth of an inch before the end. Civilization, farming, industry, society as we know it doesn’t appear until two hair widths from the end.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8V_glRW1hA&w=898&h=505]

Which shows how precious life is. If we destroy it all, and we seem hell bent on doing that, how many millions and millions of years is it going to take for it to come back again? Next time you see snow geese flying overhead, or the smile of someone you love, consider that it took over four billion years of trial and error for those wonderful things to appear.