Open AccessTime Is on Our Side (Yes, It Is)
Author(s) -
Gaffney E. S.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
eos, transactions american geophysical union
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.316
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 2324-9250
pISSN - 0096-3941
DOI - 10.1029/2008eo410006
Subject(s) - aka , perspective (graphical) , foundation (evidence) , history , geology , philosophy , archaeology , art , computer science , library science , visual arts
Russell Seitz (aka Chicken Little) concludes that geologic time is running out (Eos, 89(20), 187, 2008). He envisions a bleak future for the science that soon will be saturated with geologists, each restricted to but a single millennium for his or her studies. But the true future of geoscience is not the dark briefness that he has portrayed. The alarming crisis envisioned by Seitz—that there will not be enough rocks for geologists to study—is based on the onedimensional view of time used by such nineteenth‐ century foundational geologists as James Hutton and Charles Lyell. When the problem is looked at from the twentiethcentury perspective of Albert Einstein, the crisis is found to be deferred beyond the projected time of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.