When was the Earth first made?

It was the school holidays and I had settled in for some relaxing time in the house with my son. I was so used to going out and about all day with my daughter that getting my head around this type of activity was hard. But I went with the classic in house activities of baking and painting. I had found a baking kit for cakes where you decorated them as planets. This was brilliant. My son loved the planets. He had a poster on his wall of them and could name them all. He was fascinated by them. He asked lots of planet related questions before – see my blog “What happens to the world after everyone dies?”

We baked the cakes and had a lovely time. My son was a great baker actually. Very precise. The recipe called for 50g of flour we got it to 55g so took some out, it went down to 48g so he wanted me to add some, it went up to 51g and he wanted me to take some away. You would not believe how difficult it was to get to exactly 50g. It took a while but we managed it and the cakes went and came back out of the oven. After they had cooled we decorated them. And when we were decorating the earth cake he asked:

“When was the earth first made?”

A very good question. I was tempted to answer well it was made 20 minutes ago when we made the cakes, but I didnt. A quick google told me the answer was actually 4.54 billion years ago. Wow!!! I am a 40 year old grown up and even I struggled with understanding how long ago 4.54 billion years was. I couldn’t get my head round it but I knew my son would want to understand this. I also knew this answer would lead to more and more questions. Particularly as my son was very very interested in time. The time questions never stopped from him as I am sure you aware if you had read “What Time is it?” and “Time and the Many Many Questions of My Child!” and lately he had been asking me things like….

“Why is a second shorter than a minute?”
“How many minutes is 3 hours?”
“How many hours have I been alive?”
“How many minutes have I been alive?”

And with every answer I gave him he had more and more questions.
I knew that talking about time comforted him so one day I tried to distract him from the anxiety he was feeling about going into school and so I started talking to him about time while we were standing on the playground. And the conversation went like this….

Me: “You have 6 hours of school to do.”
Him: “How many minutes is that?”
Me: “360 minutes”
Him: “Do you have 360 minutes at work?”
Me: “Nooo, I have 8 hours of work which is 480 minutes”

We continued to talk about time, minutes and hours and I did lots of sums for him working out how many minutes various hours were and he went into school happier than when we started the conversation. I went to do my 480 minutes of work and never thought any more of it but when my son got dropped off just as I was finishing work he came in the house and the first thing he said to me was…

“Have you finished your 480 minutes of work?”

I wondered had he been thinking about that all day!! He must have been thinking about it for the last 480 minutes. He loves minutes! Why does he like things broken down into minutes?!? I think it is because he can count to 60. I have noticed he will ask me how long until we are going and I will say the classic “two minutes” he then starts mouthing something which I believe is him counting to 60 then counting to 60 again for the two minutes. I hope he hadn’t been counting for 480 minutes but nothing would surprise me!!!

Minutes he could cope with but the concept of one year was a strange one to him because technically the year started in January and ended in December. He believed that because his birthday was in June he should be older than his sister who was born in August. It was a conversation we had many many times. I have written about it before in my blog post Mum, how long did it take you to get to 40 years old?. He wanted to know when did that year start, when did it end. I had tried to explain to him that time isn’t linear there isn’t a start and end point it just goes on and on and on but by telling him when the earth was first made this was suggesting that there was a starting point. And that starting point was actually 4.54 billion years ago. Telling my son that there was a starting point which would never get to the end point was going to be difficult. But of course I did tell him. As soon as I told him it was 4.54 billion years ago he wanted to know how many minutes that was? So I looked it up. And the answer is:

2.386 x 10¹⁵ minutes

I actually have no idea what that means. When was the earth first made, although a simple enough question the related questions about the concept of time was profound. It was a profound question that led us down the rabbit hole of time once again. And I found myself at a loss, acknowledging that some concepts transcend our everyday understanding. And so, with a smile, I simply replied, “Oh, too many to count,” leaving the unfathomable mysteries of time lingering in the air (for now!!!), much like the sweet aroma of freshly baked planet-shaped cakes.