With business out of the way, Anstruther Rotary Club’s speaker on 25th August was club member and retired physicist George Hunter. With many references to author Bill Bryson’s entertaining book ‘A short history of nearly everything’ we covered topics from the improbability of life, the formation of Earth and our likely future. Twenty minutes hardly seemed sufficient to encompass it all!

George compared the 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history to a twenty-four hour day. It seems it was 11 pm before the dinosaurs arrived – and they only lasted 40 minutes. We humans apparently waited until 1 minute and 17 seconds before midnight to appear on the scene – by this reckoning Rotary clubs could hardly be taking more than a few milliseconds!!

What with the risks of disease, famine, volcanoes, asteroid collision, electromagnetic radiation, magnetic pole reversal; not to mention the end of our Sun, basically it seems, as Private Frazer would have it, ‘we’re all doomed!’

George explored his subject with enthusiasm and it must be said there were important messages – not least placing human conflict in perspective. A reminder too that just about a year ago the news story was of the space probe Voyager-1 leaving our solar system for inter-stellar space. Some of the stories included a photograph taken in 1990 from a distance of four billion miles and showing our Earth as the tiniest blue speck; insignificant, isolated, remote, vulnerable - as astronomer Carl Sagan said very simply: ‘That's here. That's home. That's us.’  

Altogether it was an interesting and entertaining talk and – with tongue firmly in cheek one can imagine a story to gladden the heart of the most extreme pessimist; as George said ‘it can only get worse’. A formal vote of thanks was proposed by Eric Dewhirst. More about the Rotary club of Anstruther is at (www.rotaryanstruther.org)