The Earth in Time
This post starts with an excerpt from my essay on the eruption of Vesuvius with some modifications.
79 CE
How does the Earth form in such a way that it has a molten center that can break through its crust? How is it possible, in other words, for the eruption of Vesuvius to happen?
Descending into this question will take us back to the formation of the Earth and another instance of a clinamen.
We should attend to the temporality that is inherent in this story. We are fond of talking about these kinds of stories with terms like ‘gradual’ or ‘eventually’ or ‘process’ or phrases like ‘under the right conditions’ such and such is possible. We hide the contingency of the movements involved under these terms that smooth the flow of time and turn it into a line. Yes, we tell ourselves that the birth of the Earth was messy and took many millions of years, but when we label it as ‘gradual’, we impose a linearity of time that occludes our ability to see all the other percolating times hidden by the name ‘gradual’.
What if we descend into the contingencies glossed over and smoothed out by these phrases? To invoke terms like clinamen or chaos or contingency of motion is to try to grasp the percolation of time as it moves forward. ‘Gradual’ and ‘eventual’ are always retrospective terms that allow us to call the past ‘done’ and to place us at the end of a ‘process’ that carries with it the sense of smoothness. It returns us to the comfort of things and alleviates us from coming to terms with what Nāgārguna called pratityasamutpada — i.e,. the existence of any so-called thing as the result of its connectedness with all other things. When we radicalize this connectedness by seeing connectedness as prior to any thing, we find ourselves experiencing contingency.
As we stare into the gradualness of the formation of our Solar System, we find nothing but contingency, which is not to say randomness. Rather, we find an infinite mixture of orders and disorders.
About 4.5 billion years ago — which is already a strange statement about time since years are measured by the rotation of the Earth around the Sun — space debris from the formation of our Sun are colliding. Some collisions fuse the pieces even as more debris is created. As these conditions continue, gravity strengthens. Fusion increases in scale.
Jupiter has an essential role to play as does Saturn. Jupiter has formed and, like most gas giants in most solar systems we can see, it is moving toward its dominant star. Its path will lead to eventual absorption by the Sun. In the case of our solar system, however, Saturn has formed and is pulling Jupiter back.
We must see this as an instance of a Lucretian clinamen. As Jupiter is pulled through the debris field in its motion toward the Sun, it is stirring up more and more chaotic motion and thus causing more collisions of dust and gas and minerals in the region where Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars will form.
In the meantime, Saturn has formed and is pulling Jupiter away from the Sun. As Jupiter leaves the debris field of what we will eventually call our Inner Solar System, the chaotic motions begin to abate. It is likely at this time that the objects that make up the four inner planets have stabilized. [1]
Radioactive materials bombard this haphazard collection of debris, which heats up to between 2000 and 3000 degrees. The iron and nickel content of this object melt and a planet of lava forms.
As the motions continue, the increasing gravity pulls the heavier material to the center and pushes out the lighter material. Layers began to form. The outer materials begin to form a crust when they come in contact with the vacuum of space, which is 450 degrees below zero — another Earth-bound measurement universalized. This quasi-object, now about 30 million years old, is cooling from the outside in.
An equilibrium of motions has formed.
This equilibrium is not static. It has become a process that wasn’t originally present. It takes a long time before these collisions and fusions become anything that could be called a stable process. Eventually the continuation of this procedural equilibrium makes other processes possible — water builds up, atmosphere forms, continents form out of the accumulating waters. [2]
At some point in this internal heating and external cooling, life becomes possible. Did the self-replicating power of RNA that eventually found a home in collections of lipids living in these surface waters arrive on one of these meteorites? Was life on Earth always made of extraterrestrial ingredients?
The Earth itself has always been extraterrestrial.
New processes are grafted onto the larger process of planet formation. There may be laws of motion here, but that’s a pretty incomplete (and boring) way to understand how orders emerge from other orders.
To reduce these motions to laws is to see a smooth, linear flow of time. To do so is to miss a lot of details that can’t be reduced to simply talking about the reconfiguration of space in a short period of time. These motions are anything but smooth. They are chaotic motions finding predictable relationships with each other. To reduce them to fundamental laws is a profound act of faith.
The formation of the Earth, which will lead to the possibility of events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, was never foreordained. It was contingent through and through.
Let’s call this thorough-going contingency ‘nature’.
Redundancy and Repetition
What does it mean to ask, ‘How old is the Earth?’ The question starts from assumptions about time and things. It assumes that there is a moment in the linear flow of time at which the Earth can be said to have originated. From what we have seen in the foregoing, we can ask a series of questions. When exactly do we quantify the beginning? When exactly can we say that the Earth has in fact become the Earth? When, in other words, did its becoming end and its being begin?
When we expect our answer to be articulated as ‘years’, we are teetering on the brink of losing our Newtonian sense of time as the universal ticking clock of the cosmos. We begin to realize the artificiality of this construct.
These questions cut us off from experiencing the cosmos and ourselves as fundamentally a bundle of contingent motions. From Nāgārguna’s perspective of emptiness (sunyata) and dependent arising (pratityasamutpada), we have cut ourselves off from the full experience of these two truths. We desperately want to find things where, if we are honest with ourselves, we should only see contingent motions working out their temporary regularities and equilibria.
This does not mean that the two truths are only ever chaos if by chaos we mean utter and completely random events with no connection to each other or to a past-present-future composition of time.
As we have stared into this clinamen, we have found nothing but motions working out regularities within an environment full of irregularities and simultaneous regularities. Debris from the formation of the Sun is moving about. Rocks are colliding with other rocks. They share similar minerals and elements; some they do not share. Mixtures form in the collisions. More debris forms in the collisions giving rise to other collisions. Gravity becomes stronger in this emergent object, and other elements are drawn in. Radioactive elements are draw in and heat the nickel and other metals. These heavier elements get drawn further inwards — let’s not yet call it a center — and lighter ones migrate outward. The brutal cold of ‘space’ cools the outward moving elements, and eventually a crust forms.
Is this now the Earth? We don’t yet have water or oxygen or other elements that would support life. We are the Buddha’s chariot without wheels, which raises the question of whether it is a chariot.
No matter how hard we stare into this clinamen, we will not find the ‘original fusion’ though we know that it must have happened. But this ‘original fusion’ is only original from the vantage point that is looking retrospectively for the Earth. As we stare, we look for certainties that can only be emergent within a field of possibilities.
Later in this essay we will complicate the field, which I am letting stand for now as a spatial concept. I will radically temporalize it. For now, we shall simply continue to seek to experience the contingency of time by staring into a clinamen.
Time is not yet time as we have composed it since Newton.
Repetition and Abstract Time
We are fond of saying the the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. As I wrote at the beginning of this, that is a very strange statement. A year is a single orbit of the Earth around the Sun. But this relationship does not yet exist. There is no Earth and there is barely a Sun. Not enough gravity has formed to guarantee the repetition and redundancy of orbital motion in this region of the cosmos.
This statement — along with other equally absurd statements like ‘the cosmos is 13.8 billion years old’ — is only possible by universalizing our local temporality of axial and orbital motions into an abstract Newtonian clock ticking away independent of all motion. By universalizing our time, we have placed ourselves back comfortably at rest in the center of the universe. This universalizing of time works hand in hand with our intuition that we are tracking ‘processes’ that are ‘gradual’ and ‘smooth’.
If we remove the assumption of this abstract and disembodied clock, what happens to time? Where would we find time if we assume that it exists, which I believe we should? We would be forced to see time as an emergent property related only to the specific motions in question.
We need to be careful here. Time does exist; it just doesn’t exist as the same thing in all places. It exists by virtue of emerging from motions that are forming relationships with each other. The more redundancy and repetition become regularities, the more time becomes stable and potentially measurable. If the regularities fall apart, time falls apart with them.
This is different than when physicists talk about time as only an illusion of consciousness. Time is real. It does happen. It just doesn’t happen in an always straightforward and uniform way.
This is different, also I think, than Einstein’s relativity, which only relativized the present but not all of time. Time for Einstein is still a line and is very much tied to space as primary. For Einstein, the problem was the simultaneity of events, which means making the present into the problem. This is not, as Bergson pointed out, a full engagement with time. Only the present remains relative as a spatial problem of simultenaity, but the past and future exist simultaneously in a tightly determined Block Universe. The only human experience of the passage of time is an illusion just as the simultaneity of the present is an illusion.
Einstein’s subject is, in other words, still Modern. It is not nearly as advanced as Darwin’s.
Genesis
We can turn for help understanding this to Michel Serres’ Genesis, specifically the section on ‘Time’:
Time is not, as a rule, a line, although it may become one, and then start selecting, sorting, eliminating, getting all at once bushier with bifurcations: another time on top of time, appears; time, nonlinear, is, most often, a sheet or a field. (Genesis, James and Nielsen trans., University of Michigan Press, 1995, page 115)
To be clear, time is moving forward, but this does not make it only linear. The irreversibility of the second law of thermodynamics need not imply a smooth line. All that it implies is that there is a past and a future both of which have passed through a present that does not allow for reversibility.
The second law does not describe time. It is not a formulation of time. It is a formulation of the movement of energy from relative stability to less stability. When we translate this to time, we see that this entropic movement of energy must be carved through local motions. The movement of Jupiter through the debris field cannot be singularly described as entropic. Within the the energy that it moves around, chaotic motion is increasing, but so are new forms of order increasing with the chaos. More collisions are leading to more fusion and more debris, which leads to more fusion and more debris.
What is order and what is disorder within this entropic movement? Where does one locate time in this chaotic movement? What would we choose to be our clock that measures the regularity of Jupiter’s motion?
So, within this entropic movement of energy there are equally real bifurcations, collisions, fusions, and myriad other motions that create all manner of times within the forward motion of irreversible time. When Vesuvius erupts in 79 CE, the second law is imposing its force on the local times of the inhabitants. To describe this event using entropy as linear time seems to miss a whole lot of the reality. Time is linear, but it is not smooth by any stretch of our imaginations. It is violent as it enforces its temporality on all the other temporalities that are present in the scene — like the bread baking in the oven, or Pliny the Elder getting some sleep as ash reigns down, or Pliny the Younger continuing his study of Livy from across the bay.
To bring this back to the Earth and its ‘beginning’: within the field of debris, time is passing, but there are innumerable other times that are constituted by the chaos of motions in the field. Within this field, in other words, there are myriad motions that are ‘selecting, sorting, eliminating, getting all at once bushier with bifurcations’. Within this field, over some period of time that is moving forward, a regularity begins to emerge: one set of fused materials gains more gravity than others.
This regularity is not the Earth’s beginning as an instant that guarantees its inexorable formation. So much more needs to happen that is not at all guaranteed simply by one object gaining gravitational superiority over others. The regularity of gravitational pull has not yet stabilized within the chaotic noise of the debris field. It is not yet anything close to what we would call the Earth. This event — if we can call it that — is likely happening in myriad locations — if we can name locations at this point.
Thus the question ‘How old is the Earth?’ begs the question of what constitutes its ‘beginning.’ In fact, it begs the question of what constitutes any beginning? When we want the Earth to be a thing with essential traits — a molten core, a hard crust, an atmosphere of oxygen, oceans covering most of its surface, et cetera — we find our simple answer of ‘when’ stymied by the reality of chaotic motion that refuses to be a measurable timeline.
When we remove the absurd statement about the age of the Earth specified in years, then we truly confront the reality of time as the result of contingent motions working out — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — their regularities, redundancies, repetitions, and rhythms.
When a fluctuation appears or forms, it is never a beginning, not a sowing, it is just one of the myriads, of noise, indistinguishable, incapable of differentiation. (118)
Differentiation can emerge only when regularity forms in the debris field. This differentiation would be recognizable as the greater share of gravity created by one of the fusions becoming large enough to differentiate itself from the others in its neighborhood — a neighborhood that does not properly exist until the gravity forms and the coordinated dance of attraction, dispersion, and orbits works its way into existence. Until then, ‘they await a frequentative’ (118).
Beyond Thinking Difference
We are now staring into one of Serres’ key differences with his poststructuralist peers, specifically Deleuze and Derrida. Serres is not trying to ‘think difference’ without resolving difference into some form of sameness. He has brought us into chaotic fields out of which difference and sameness may or may not emerge. By moving away from abstract logics — Difference and Repetition, differánce and logocentrism — Serres is looking at concrete things (like time) and showing us in concrete material ways how difference, repetition, differánce and logocentric rationality emerge from a multiplicity that is not reducible to a primary and preceding logic.
With Serres, I learn to see the contingency of beginnings because I am not looking for a governing logic. I am not deconstructing beginnings into the prior movement of difference and repetition. I am not deconstructing my desire for presence by following the traces of logocentrism in the stories we tell about the origins of the planet.
I am attending to the contingency of beginnings in a way that seems far more realistic than what Deleuze or Derrida were able to articulate. Their interests were in the undoing of Western Metaphysics from within. Serres needs no elaborate thinking of difference. He just attends to the way things are — contingent motions working out their temporary redundancies, repetitions, rhythms, and regularities with each other. This is simply a better way of explaining what is happening when we talk about the beginning of some thing.
Once I am able to think this way, Western Metaphysics doesn’t necessarily get deconstructed. It melts away like Bergson’s sugar cube. Its logocentrism and precious binary oppositions simply become cumbersome and unnecessary. By delving into the chaotic beginnings of the Earth and attending to the obvious contingency of motions, I simply don’t need terms like ‘beginning’ or ‘laws of motion’ or ‘Newtonian clock time’ or other stand-ins for essences and explanatory frameworks. They don’t necessarily fit the explanation that is obviously contingent motion working out more or less fragile regularities.
To be sure, I do need some conceptual apparatus. Motion, repetition, regularity, redundancy all are useful terms to describe what is happening. But these terms don’t carry inherent logics in the way that the conceptual apparatus of Deleuze did. They allow for the framing of the inquiry without the inquiry starting out as a narrowing exercise that goes looking for difference-and-repetition, rhizomes, machines, et cetera.
If Serres’ concepts do carry inherent logics, we should be on the look out for them. Is parasitism and inherent logic? Is it a law of motion? It could be. But it became far less important as Serres’ work moved beyond the more systematic and theoretical works like The Birth of Physics, The Parasite, Genesis, and moved on to what I’ll call the more spiritual and experiential works like The Troubadour of Knowledge, Hominescence, The Incandescent, and Branches (to cite their English titles). These later works rely far less on the conceptual apparatus of the earlier works, which is still present, but only as ghosts that enable a new experience of things as contingency.
In short, the earlier works describe and lay out concepts that explain contingent motion as fundamental reality. The later works focus on articulating the experiential consequences of taking this reality seriously.
There are, of course, key moments in Serres’ work where he deconstructs Western Metaphysics. But this is not the point of the effort as it was certainly for Derrida, possibly Deleuze. The point is to broaden our capacity for experience, not narrow it. This is why important concepts like parasitism and clinamen give way to other concepts like incandescence, natural contracts, and branches. It’s not about establishing a system of thought. It is about broadening experience by pushing it beyond limits. As soon as a concept becomes limiting it can simply melt away as it morphs into a newer version — the clinamen will become incandescence, bifurcations, and branching.
Strangely enough, this broadening comes simply by looking at things through the lens of contingent motion and seeing what is quite obvious.
Contingency and Redundancy
From the later perspective of the already-formed Earth, we can imagine many candidates for this gravitational leader. But in the midst of this debris and its collisions, we have nothing but what Serres called ‘the omniture of novelties’ — i.e., so many things are possible, but we would only be able to understand them retrospectively.
Deciding what is regular and what is irregular from amidst this floating debris is difficult to determine. For one rock to collide with another requires regularity — the molecules that have gathered together to form a rock, and it is carving a path through space. It also requires irregularity — it collides with another rock and something novel forms. That novelty could be fusion; it could be a glancing blow where the change is minimal; it could be the formation of new debris; it is likely all of these. These latter statements, however, indicate the existence of another regularity: a collision leads to more debris, more damage, possible fusions — i.e., regularities specific to the event of a collision.
At this moment in the formation of the Earth — itself retrospective prepositional phrases posed as a present from a future where we can see a ‘process’ of origination — there is an infinitude of possibilities with no guarantee that what will emerge is some thing that eventually will be called ‘the Earth’ by one species of its inhabitants that eventually develops the capacity for a language that labels what it sees.
Time is a threshold between disorder and redundancy, it is the multiplicity next to chaos and prior to all spatialities. It is the first injection of redundancy into a pure multiplicity. (Serres, Genesis, 117)
We should try to understand this statement by continuing to stare into the clinamen that gives dependent arising (pratityasamutpada) to the Earth. We are staring into a ‘threshold between disorder and reduncancy’. In the collision of debris, we find redundancies and regularities abound.
A rock is hardly a uniform object. It is made of already differentiated materials. It is a relative stability within the field of debris. Molecules have gathered together to form compounds — iron, nickel, silicon, aluminum, et etcetera. These compounds don’t exist at the moment of the Big Bang. Their regularities must be worked out well before any of the events of this clinamen I am tracking can be possible.
When rocks collide, from the perspective of a single rock, chaos emerges — each is thrown off its previously regular and predictable course. From the perspective of the collision, however, another regularity happens. In all collisions, damage to both will occur and new debris will be created. This capacity is what Serres is calling in the passage cited a ‘redundancy’. It is something that we can retrospectively say happens with a certain degree of confidence because it happens over and over again.
Redundancy happens when repetition becomes predicatable. Materials gather and hold together to form rocks. We could reasonably say that these materials form contracts with each other to behave together in predictable (i.e., redundant and repetitive) ways when they encounter each other. This redundancy and repetition goes all the way down as the physicists say: the molecules themselves are composed of redundant and repetitive atoms that have formed contractual motions between a certain number of electrons orbiting a nucleus.
For us to make a simple designation such as ‘the hydrogen atom’ automatically acknowledges that a stable redundancy has occurred in the cosmos.
Nothing, however, guarantees permanence to any of this. There is no unmoved mover governing the motion. This repetition, therefore, ought not to be understood as a thing. It too is contingency through and through. It does not proceed according to prior laws of motion. The laws themselves have to be worked out, and in the working out, laws become the expression of a stabilized redundancy and repetition. To assume they are prior to order and that they are eternal — at least so long as the cosmos exists — is simply that: an assumption.
At some point, enough debris will fuse such that the object that will eventually be called the Earth gains gravitational dominance over other debris. It takes on a gravitational force that is stronger than the others in its emergent neighborhood. In Serres way of putting it, ‘redundancy increases slightly, and an order begins to be born’ (Genesis 117).
Process
We should not call this a process. Whitehead’s philosophy is not yet possible in this clinamen. Redundancy and repetition have yet to form the predictable interactions that we could call a process.
At best we could say that a process is being prepared, or that it is emergent. Of course, this would itself be a statement made in time — retrospectively from the vantage point of an Earth that has already formed. If one were somehow to be transported into this field and if their subjectivity and its consciousness remained in tact, they wouldn’t see the Earth forming. They wouldn’t perceive a process.
I will quote Serres at length:
What is a process? Process is a step or a dance, an advance. Process is a procession. Indeed, it is necessary that one of them begin, lead off with a step or get off on a foot. Time is a process. Basic time prepares the process. Here is disorder, here is chaos, here is the patchwork of badly stitched tatters, upon which there appears, locally, a first process or the beginning of a process. In order for it to pursue its sequence, it will certainly have to have some repetition, it will have, in some way, to go from a step to a second step. And so forth. It then enters a time that is to some extent reversible, already assimilable, or reducible to a space. (117)
Redundancy and repetition need not be understood as fundamental, as a physicist might understand that term. They are emergent. A step only becomes a step when the second step reproduces the actions of the first. The first step becomes ‘the first step’ only when the second step happens, but also when there is some capacity to recognize the second event as resembling and repeating the motions of the first.
This need not be understood, however, as repetition of the same. The second step is not the same as the first. It is repetition only to the degree that it reproduces a set of motions that may become a reproducible pattern.
Nor should this be understood as action in a void. It is motion within a field of other motions. A step is not a step unless it trods on some other set of motions constituting a predictable enough surface that would support the motions involved in stepping.
This makes the distinction between fundamental and emergent a bit of a problem.
Panchrone
We have traced time with something of a bias toward space — collisions occurring in a partially defined region of the universe that is not yet our Solar System. If we leave it here, we ignore a much larger dimension of time that is equally important to understanding nature as pratityasamutpada. Serres called it ‘Panchrone’ in L’Incandescent. ‘Traveling in pure space would leave the subject invariant; traveling in time does away with it’ (The Incandescent, Randolph Burks trans.. 120).
A simple example will suffice. Dr. Who is a time traveler, but he really doesn’t travel in time. He travels in spatialized time, as Bergson might have put it. No matter ‘when’ the Tardis takes him it is always only ever a ‘where’. His subjectivity (and his companions’) remains in tact. If this were actually time travel, the subject would have to devolve and evolve with the traversing of time.
Panchrone becomes the capacity to experience the deeply temporal aspect of our entanglement in the cosmos. As such, it is an aspect of our subjectivity that we can take up through exercises like imagining the ‘beginning’ of the world. ‘Panchrone has trouble being born, for he immediately vanishes; ten million years from here, he is already a quadruped; a little more and he crawls like a reptile or flies like a bird; lastly he is reduced to a single cell’ (120).
Where am I and what am I in this imagining? Not only am I not yet. The conditions of possibility for the species of which I am but one instance are not even close to becoming. So many more motions need to work out their contracts before even a single cell can gain the power of self-reproduction — i.e., gain the RNA and DNA that will ensure redundancy, repetition, and regularity at scale. Following Darwin’s logic of Natural Selection, how many attempts need to be made for RNA to find a home in some fatty acids? How many attempts before this trial and error becomes a ‘process’? Evolution works by fits and starts before regularities take hold as processes.
We are the historical artifacts of these fits and starts that have become processes:
I carry in my body the constituent elements of the Universe and, although differently, the constituent elements of myself; my organs are composed of thousands of billions of cells; there isn’t a single part of my flesh that isn’t left from a bifurcating event of this time — I am, live and think from these traces and marks; even the composition of my interior milieu resembles the composition of the oceans from which we came. (122)
Pneuma
This isn’t so difficult to understand. It ought to be rather intuitive. We are dependently conditioned on an infinitude of contingent motions that happened, over the course of millions of years and after evolutionary fits and starts, to coalesce into relatively stable regularities.
Let’s call this contingency of motion nature. ‘Panchrone percolates like Pangea. How can we not declare this me to be universal and “natural”?’ (122).
A simple exercise to begin to experience Panchrone. Focusing on the breath is a common meditation technique. We tend to concentrate on it as our own. I am breathing. What if, for just a few moments, you are able to experience the breath as an inheritance from the cosmos? What if you experience this very simple and involuntary act of breathing as your entanglement in le Grand Récit? It is your breath, but only insofar as your capacity to breath is a vastly shared inheritance that took billions of years to become possible. ‘From the air he breathes to the water drunk, nails, faeces or noble neurons, Panchrone is several billion years old’ (122).
Footnotes
[1] For a brief summary of this process, listen to the Dr. Lydia Hallis interview in the Origins of Water episode of The Ancients. The summary starts at 5:00 minutes.
[2] In the same interview cited above, the focus of the discussion is how water becomes part of the Earth. There are two main theories: 1) it arrives after the Earth is largely formed as asteroids carrying water molecules bombard the Earth before an atmosphere can form; 2) the original debris that made up the Earth was interacting with Solar Wind, which carries hydrogen atoms. If the hydrogen atoms stick to debris carrying an oxygen atom, you get water.