Time Scales Quotes

The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.

Technology can progress to an entire new generation in the time it takes one legislative committee to issue a report. Regulation of technology confronts us with two radically different time scales.

The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.

The need to incorporate longer term time scales into our societal choices is very real—and right in the lap of our generation.

Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.

For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth.

In order to have a decent chance to be a communicating species, you would have to learn to think and plan and act over time scales of a century or a millennium.

There is a dilemma, to reconcile three time scales: in the short term, the economy; in the middle range, global well-being generally; and, in the long range, the environment.