Of course, humanity will be long extinct, our most enduring contribution to the geological record a precipitous rise in carbon dioxide and perhaps a narrow band of plastic threaded through the strata. Some geologists predict that North America will be part of a future supercontinent, that Europe and Africa, Asia and Australia will all coalesce together as they did when Pangea existed, and then the hillside on which my little house stands will be long gone, buried under layers of strata, or on the floor of a mighty ocean. A half-billion years from now, and with the vagaries of plate tectonics, the place that was once Pittsburgh may again be in the tropics, or the arctic, or under the ocean. Eventually, everything loses its war of attrition with entropy: steel and concrete, glass and iron, all of the monuments of humanity. ‘To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust,’ writes the palaeontologist Thomas Halliday in Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds (2022), describing the past as not just ‘an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but … a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.’
Some 270 million years ago, the spot where I’m now sitting would have sat next to the tropical shoals of a warm, globe-spanning, shallow ocean, populated by massive invertebrates and amphibians, the oxygen-rich air giving flight to dragonflies with the wingspans of birds and arachnids of nightmarish proportions. I’m writing in the dining room of my family’s home in Pittsburgh, a yellow-and-green craftsman house that’s a century old, not far from the confluence of the Ohio River in the Allegheny Mountains.
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