Editing Deep time (section)

== Intellectual responses ==
Throughout history, scholars and thinkers have attempted to make the vastness of deep time more intelligible. In ''[[The Science of Life]]'' (1929), [[H. G. Wells]] and [[Julian Huxley]] dismissed the difficulty of grasping geological time, arguing that "The use of different scales is simply a matter of practice."<ref>H. G. Wells, Julian S. Huxley, and G. P. Wells, ''The Science of Life'' (New York: The Literary Guild, 1934; orig. publ. 1929), p. 326.</ref> Like maps or microscopes, deep time requires training the imagination. 

[[File:Nature_timespiral_vertical_layout.png|thumb|300px|In this illustration of the [[Big History]] the unit [[Billion years|Ga ("giga-annum")]] has been chosen to bring the different periods and events into graspable numbers.]]Modern authors have echoed this need for reframing. Physicist [[Gregory Benford]]'s ''Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia'' (1999) and paleontologist [[Henry Gee]]'s ''In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life'' (2001){{sfn|Korthof|2000}}{{sfn|Campbell|2001}}  both explore how science and storytelling intersect to help people comprehend timescales far beyond human experience. [[Stephen Jay Gould]]'s ''[[Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle]]'' (1987) traces how scientific metaphors shape our temporal assumptions.

11th century thinkers, like [[Avicenna]]{{sfn|Toulmin|Goodfield|1965|p=64}} in Persia and [[Shen Kuo]]{{sfn|Sivin|1995|pp=iii,23-24}} in China, proposed timelines that stretched far beyond biblical frameworks.{{clarification needed|reason=Is it really meaningful to claim that a Muslim and a Daoist-Confucian had any relation to "biblical frameworks"?|date=April 2025}} Meanwhile, [[Thomas Berry]] and [[Joanna Macy]] argue that experiencing deep time is essential to planetary stewardship, influencing movements like [[deep ecology]] and [[ecosophy]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=THOMAS BERRY |url=https://ecozoicstudies.org/musings/2014/thomas-berry/ |access-date=2025-02-18 |website=Center for Ecozoic Studies |language=en-US}}</ref>

Together, these voices highlight a central challenge of deep time: not only measuring it, but making it meaningful.