As I finish designing an introductory course on conservation science, I cannot help but reflect on the big ideas. One of them is the inherent lesson of time: all buildings eventually decay and fall, just as we humans will all eventually decay, and if one stretches the time scale to millions of years, our planet will eventually face death. There will be a time when the Sun will become a red star and absorb the Earth. The Universe itself will eventually die: it will stop expanding and may begin to contract, a process that will eventually lead back to the Big Bang.
Entropy is inevitable. There is no way of escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Knowing the inevitability of entropy makes every endeavor a bit futile, including designing a course on conservation, a bit meaningless. Why bother organizing files and worrying about student’s learning if we will all eventually face death? I suppose one escapes this existential futility by realizing that our experience with reality is limited by three dimensions. Time is the fourth dimension we can only experience as something that only moves in a direction. For us, it is a reluctant vector pointing at a single direction: forward.
Maybe there are beings in the fourth dimension whose notion of time is not as a set vector, but something more malleable. Maybe every tiny effort in organizing a course, every step in prolonging a building or site from its inevitable decay, serves a purpose we as three-dimensional beings are unable to grasp. Maybe every single step, every effort, every action, does count towards something.