Sky High

Sky High

Noel Laflin

11-13-18

I’ve been trying to imagine the first Homo sapiens and just how long ago they lived. I don’t even know what took me down this rabbit hole this morning. But, as often happens, one article leads to another.

Then I came across this reference by Wisconsin professor John Hawkes who says to imagine you’re holding your mother’s hand, your mother is holding her mother’s hand, and the chain continues all the way back 300,000 years. “What we’re talking about is about 10,000 to 15,000 [people] in a row — the population of a small town is what connects you to that time frame,” he says.

I like when someone paints me a picture like this. Ronald Reagan did so once when he was trying to explain just how much a trillion dollars is. I was watching that 1981 broadcast when he said:

“A few weeks ago I called such a figure, a trillion dollars, incomprehensible, and I’ve been trying ever since to think of a way to illustrate how big a trillion really is. And the best I could come up with is that if you had a stack of thousand-dollar bills in your hand only 4 inches high, you’d be a millionaire. A trillion dollars would be a stack of thousand-dollar bills 67 miles high.”

So now I’m wondering just how high in the sky ten-to-fifteen thousand hand-holding Homo sapiens might reach.

If I find a good illustration, I’ll let you know