ABSTRACT
Thirty-six years ago the philosopher–physicist T. J. Fraser, founder of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST), summarized the evolutionary levels of the cosmos, from the particulate to the stars and galaxies, earth and life, and finally humans and their social institutions, adding that “the stable integrative levels created by these steps survive and coexist today.” They coexist in a complex nested reality where laws of lower levels provide parameters for higher levels while higher levels exhibit emergent properties. Fraser then established a foundation for his own philosophy of temporalities; “it follows that time itself has evolved along a path corresponding to the evolutionary complexification of matter” (Fraser 1982, 35). Over the past half century, the sciences have provided a chronology for the history of humanity, life, earth, the Milky Way, and the Universe. The age of Homo sapiens is now been extended to 300,000 years, life to 3.8 billion years (byr), the earth to 4.56 byr, the Milky Way to 12.6 byr, and the universe to 13.8 byr. These dates were established following 300 years of guesswork dating including various ingenious calculations for the age of the earth (Gorst 2001), but we now have good reason to expect that these dates will stand with only minor adjustments.
