Fossil Butte National Monument timeline and the future of humanity.
Above: Fossil Butte National Monument, Lincoln County, Wyoming, 30 July 2024.
Out and about on the 'Wing. Round trip by motorcycle from Park City, Utah to Kemmerer, WY, Fossil Butte National Monument, WY, Rich County, UT, Evanston, WY back to Park City. 264 miles. Image: The Actuary, and Guzzi. Not in image, Peterbilt joined later.
I have made a half dozen visits over the last twenty years to Fossil Butte National Monument, a little visited, out of the way feature of the US national park system. Apart from having a great picnic spot, the monument exists to feature a huge fifty-million-year-old fossil field once a lakebed. The size of the fossil bed is so extensive that people are allowed, with specific permission, to search for fossils and take them away. Also, near the visitor's center, and in the nearby town of Kemmerer, WY, there are stores which sell fossils retrieved at Fossil Butte National Monument.
There is a fascinating auxiliary feature of the national monument: a half mile long geological timeline with signs denoting the epochs and eras of the 4.6-billion-year-old earth along the national monument's entry road. The timeline representing the earth's last 500 million years continues on a fence that surrounds the national monument visitor's center. Red and white labels on the fence note significant earth events just as the road signs do on the last half mile coming into the monument.
The Fossil Butte National Monument timeline reminds me to be humble in an era where human arrogance seems to be off the charts. Humanity is a hardly discernable flicker when viewed in the context of geologic time. Homosapiens (or human consciousness), which was first noted on the earth 30 thousand years ago, takes up only an inch at the end of the half mile timeline.
Considering the fragility of human consciousness in the near incomprehensible scheme of geologic time I don't believe humanity's perpetuation is guaranteed. Along the timeline fence are white labels representing the timing of the five extinctions on the earth that have occurred in the last 500 million years. As the earth's creative process is ongoing, I know that there will be another extinction event.
Mass Extinctions on the earth
- End Ordovician (444 million years ago)
- Late Devonian (360 million years ago)
- End Permian (250 million years ago)
- End Triassic (200 million years ago)
- Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) (which killed off the dinosaurs 70 million years ago)
What happened in the End Permian extinction, 250 million years ago, will recur, perhaps not tomorrow, perhaps, not even in ten thousand years, but a sixth extinction is inevitable. As continental shifts exposed rifts in the earth in what is now Siberia, 250 million years ago, ongoing continental drift in Africa's Grand Rift Valley or a blow of the Yellowstone Caldera will expose the earth to the same extinction forces that created magma storms which lasted several thousand years. The Siberian magma storms at the end of the Permian resulted in the extinction of 90% of the marine species and 75% of the terrestrial species then on earth. The certainty of another Permian like extinction does not take into account the possibility of the arrival of a comet such as caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 70 million years ago or a mankind self-inflicted wound... nuclear war, man caused pandemic etc.
Because of earth's fragility and because I am convinced that human consciousness is unique in the universe (another discussion), I believe strongly in Elon Musk's quest to hedge humanity's bets by ensuring humanity goes multiplanetary. In the US where the government's impetus to explore space has been flagging in recent years, Musk's crusade to seek to populate humans on other planetary bodies represents the revival of a necessary and proper human pursuit to advance human progress and to secure the future of human consciousness. Periodic visits to the Fossil Butte National Monument timeline fence serve, at least for me, as a necessary reminder of this exigency: Reach for the stars!
PS. The Fossil Butte National Monument timeline should be a mandatory destination for school field trips. I doubt that it is.