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thing for how little we know about the human mind, itself a phenomenon in process—exotic, precious, and with its own blind spots and black holes, its own dark energy, and its own peculiar resistance to gravity.
    Looking around us, we appear to be alone. We are uncertain. We think we know where we are but the answer as to the why is not readily forthcoming. What we are, as we shall see, is easy. We are human animals—curious, witty, aggressive, reflective, wonderful, and pathetic and, as Anthony Fairall of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town once quipped, “this is the right time for us to be here.”
    COSMIC TIME
    S o, this is our time and this is where we are: Earth. We are biologically in it and of it, children of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet and a 5.5-billion-year-old star called the sun. Rotating around our parental star in a 365-day solar year, we are part of a tiny solar system in an equally tiny corner of a trillion-star cluster known as the Milky Way Galaxy. At the center of our galaxy is a black hole around which our solar system and the rest of the Milky Way spins. This dark and massive force, when viewed from Earth, is somewhere beyond the constellation of Sagittarius, about 40,000 light-years away. That’s how long, in years, it will take us to get there if we were traveling at 186,411 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second—the speed of light. It is indeed, in human dimensions, a long, long way from home.
    While these figures might be comprehensible to some, they are meaningless, really, unless we can bring them down to Earth, so to speak. By referring to cosmic years, eminent British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore has given us a way of condensing our notion of time to a more user-friendly scale.
    A cosmic year is the equivalent of 225 million solar years—the time it takes for our solar system to rotate once around the center of our galaxy. This tells us that if the Earth is 4.5 billion solar years old, then in cosmic years, dividing 4.5 billion by 225 million, the Earth is twenty cosmic years old. The Earth, then, has circled the black hole center of our galaxy roughly twenty times in its history. To put a human life span onto this time scale, seventy years translates into roughly nine cosmic seconds. And so, using the model of cosmic time, let’s review our evolutionary milestones. See how this compares with conventional time in the diagram on the next page.
    T he first two “years” of the Earth’s existence were ones of molten fury—a fiery hangover from its split from the sun. Unable to generate its own heat, it began to cool, and about eighteen cosmic years ago our hot Precambrian planet—so named after the rocks of Cambria, the former name of present-day Wales—gave rise to the world’s oldest known igneous rocks. These molten elements solidified into the well-known crystal shapes of ancient granite and basalt. With the cooling of the Earth came the ocean-forming rains and the beginning of a geological process called the cycle of stones. The alternating heat and cold of day and night caused the rocks to swell and to retract until, exhausted by the process, the outer geological skin of the basalts and granites began to erode and flake off. Carried away by wind and water, it took another two cosmic years for the first great rock formations to erode their way to the seas. The first stage in the cycle was over.
    Under the massive weight of oxygen-free water, the second stage of the cycle began. In a process of geological transformation, layer upon layer of the exfoliated and eroded igneous tissue compressed to become the oldest known sedimentary rocks on Earth. The crystals in these strata, under intense heat and pressure, were transformed in the third stage into the tough, elegantly grained metamorphic form that we find in the present-day mountain ranges such as the Alps and the Himalayas.
    A s a metaphor for the shaping of human life and character, it would appear that our