Deep time
Deep time, coined by John McPhee in Basin and Range, is a concept of geological time so vast it completely annihilates the scale of human history.
Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand years—fifty thousand, fifty million—will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.1
It decenters the human, and forces us to ask are we being good ancestors?
Seen in deep time—viewed even in the relatively shallow time since the last glaciation—the notion of human dominance over the planet seems greedy, delusory.2