Can plants, microorganisms, or highly primitive invertebrates (i.e. jellyfish) qualify for this trope? I would think they wouldn't qualify since it's normal for them to get that old. Shouldn't this trope be restricted to things where it seems unusual for it to get that old? A 10,000 year-old person is impressive, a 10,000 year-old tree is nothing out-of-the-ordinary.
Edited by ading Hide / Show RepliesThe point of the time abyss is that to us (human readers) the entity's memories stretch so far back that thinking about it gives one a sort of vertigo. Trees don't count for a different reason, they have no memory of the eons. They have no memory at all. It's not about normality, it's about memory.
But the page says the time abyss can be an inanimate object (i. e., no memory) as well as a person. The page also says that geological constructs such as mountains cannot count because we expect them to be incredibly old. But people expect trees to be incredibly old as well (not on the same scale, perhaps, but still incredibly old), so how come the pine sequoia is listed as an example but not, say, Mt. Everest? Excluding invertebrates might be stretching it admittedly, but I don't see plants and stuff.
Someone with a bit of computer-wizardry artistic knowhow should polish up one of those geologic time-spiral images (ex: http://www.emc.maricopa.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/geotime_usgs.gif) and add it to this page. It seems like a fairly fitting representation to me. (A particularly ambitious individual might even consider making their own fiction-centric version of it, with dragons, elves, Elder Things and Cthulhu et al. drawn in at the appropriate places.)
Poincaré recurrence theorem should be on the list, since Don Page calculated how long it would take until it happened in the universe (page 8). spoiler: it's a really, really, really long time
Googology wiki also has a page about the number
Edited by MABfan11 Bumbleby is best ship. busy spending time on r/RWBY and r/anime. Unapologetic Socialist