“The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but we are a young species, relatively speaking, with an average individual allotment of three score years and ten. The brevity of our lives breeds a kind of temporal parochialism—an ignorance of or an indifference to those planetary gears which turn more slowly than our own.”

— The Really Big One—An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest, The question is when. Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker, July 20, 2015 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one–