"He may even now - if I may use the phrase - be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), EPILOGUE, p. 101.
"Now," the Oolitic Age and the Triassic Age are three widely separated times.
In the first The Time Machine film, the Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that "by now" the model Time Machine is some way into the future. A comic strip about time travel began with an appalling caption that read "Half an hour ago at the end of time..." The narrative went on to recount that annihilation or nothingness simultaneously spreads from the beginning to the end of time, meeting at some point in the twentieth century. It will reach the present moment half an hour from now...
Manse Everard reflects that Wanda Tamberly left 18,244 BC bound for twentieth-century California but "now" will not arrive at anything like that. See here. Of course we can make (some) sense of the mutable timeline of the Time Patrol series and have tried to do so more than once.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Practically all of us tend to use sloppy, imprecise terminology for many things, while keeping in mind the use of such terms is only useful in a rough and ready way and would not be used like that in formally written essays.
Ad astra! Sean
Just as an aside, seas were -less- salty in the past. Salts leach out of the land and get washed down to the sea over time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember similar points being made in some of your own works, re how some farmlands lose fertility due to salts accumulating in them.
Ad astra! Sean
An interesting aside.
But salt gets removed from the sea when seawater flows into a mostly enclosed basin & evaporates, forming thick beds of salt that sometimes get buried for millions of years.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Evaporite_Formation
Over the long term is there any net increase or decrease in ocean saltiness?
There are a complex of factors which govern ocean salinity -- for example, during glacial periods it gets higher, since glaciers are freshwater and the salt is concentrated in the remaining open ocean.
There's a discontinuity in the remote past, because the process of removing salts (large buried salt beds) depends on continental drift.
Originally, the oceans were (when newly formed) freshwater. They rapidly became salty with rock-weathering and erosion. After the evolution of life, ocean forms remove salt by incorporating it in their tissues; evaporation of enclosed basins also deposits salts as solids, which can be buried under other sediments.
Short form; it was saltier than the present in the remote past; then it plunged; now it's very, very gradually increasing.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I also thought of the Dead Sea, which is about 9.6 times SALTIER than the ocean.
Ad astra! Sean
Of course, if the earth de-glaciates, that will counteract increasing salinity, at least for a while.
Note that for most of the history of life on earth, there have been no glaciers and temperatures were globally considerably higher than at present.
We evolved in a glacial period.
Wells's reference to "saline seas" generated all these comments.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Most of this blankety blank spring this year was chilly, dreary, even a flurry or two snow in early April. It sure didn't feel de-glaciated in MA!
Ad astra! Sean
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