I had a discussion about chunks of time recently. My young friend was wondering which other word would replace period in a story.
We talked about age, era, epoch, eon, millennia and an eternity and didn't really come to any conclusion as to which is bigger than which.
I thought about the year in which Project SWORD begins in TV21 with The Earth Will Die - 3031 - and tried to guess which term best describes how far away that year is from now? An age? An eon? A millennium?
[April 6th 1968]
I have avoided googling all these words and wondered if readers had any gut feelings as to how these fit together without googling them either!
As a kid, I found the Apocalyptic tone of the Project Sword stories a little hard to take.
ReplyDeleteToday they seem eerily prescient. Sure, the Earth isn't going to actually die, but our tenancy in the manner to which we have become accustomed, is looking increasingly precarious!
Fifty years ago, we had the promise of technology to help us out...
-you remember, stuff like DDT and Atomic Energy?
I'm not really up on current kid's literature, so I'm not sure if Project Sword's portents of doom are being retold to a new generation. (although it does seem Young Adult literature is running a brisk trade in Post-Apocalyse tales!)
Is the Earth still dying in kiddie's stories these days?
A millennium is one thousand years, 2020 to 3031 is 1011 years, close enough for me.
ReplyDeleteAn Age can be a few years - the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Ages in the world of comics, while the Age of Discovery lasted a few hundred years, and the Stone Age rather longer.
Eon sounds like a really long time, just a bit short of eternity.
I did not cheat, and Google, so these are just my thoughts.