coketalk asked: If by "lifespan of the earth" you mean it's current age of 4.5 billion years, and if by then "the entire existence of mankind" you mean the 100,000 or so years of our species' history, then on your clock face analogy, all of mankind counts for the last two seconds before the clock strikes midnight.
Thinking about it more, there are a few possibilities:
1) The man being interviewed, despite being English, was wrong.
2) I, despite being, well, me, am remembering the exchange incorrectly.
3) He was referring not simply to the existence of mankind, but to the length of time that earth will be habitable to any organic life.
This was, after all, something I caught eight or nine years ago while driving around LA trying to decide which drive thru to violate, and while I clearly remember being humbled and shaken, most of the facts surrounding the episode (who was talking, what was he promoting, did I go to In ‘n’ Out like a fucking robot?) have been lost to the sands of time.
There’s a reason I retired this particular Gladwellian conversational party trick almost immediately, and it’s that I have no way of backing it up. It’s the sort of thing you say and then just shrug.
At any rate, I’ll look into it, if ever there was a day to waste dredging through the KCRW web archives, it’s today.
