How One Can Get Lost in the World of Time

If you are confronted with the fact that there are some 7.8 billion people inhabiting this little planet of ours, you might want to stop for a minute and think about what that means.

We learnt to live in this world using numbers as a crutch, as a reference point without thinking about its real value to our personal lives. 7.8 billion, and that’s it. Move onto another number. But what does 7.8 billion people really mean? Nothing. It is just a number, which we think we understand, but do we?

Take one man’s life span of say 75years. Now take three such men touching one another on the time-line and you have 200 years and some. Yet, only one of those three man can be found in the memory of his offspring, and the family line memory, in most cases, ends with grandchildren and after that the case runs cold.

So you have three men put next to one another, cradle to grave, yet only one of them is in the living memory of his closest relatives.

Now think 30 such men, touching one another on the line of history, and you find yourself back some 2000 years. 31 men’s lives take you to the time before Christ. 70+ and you are in the midst of the flourishing Egypt. 133+ and you are around the time of the Biblical Great Flood. And now you say with me: “7.8 billion people”.

Go on a social network, look for someone you once new, type in their name and see what you get. Seemingly endless list of people of that name, perhaps all except the one you are looking for. Type in your name there instead.

Remember the original purpose of the family name? If there were two Johns in the village, you added “the son of XY” so as to avoid confusion. We came up with the family names to achieve distinctiveness. Individuality. There was to be only one with such a name!

Dinosaurs lived between 245 – 66 millions years ago. They were inhabiting this planet for millions of years. Modern recorded human civilization is about 10,000+ years old. There are about 7.8 billion people living on the mother Earth now.

No wonder that some people can feel lost in this interconnected world of ours.