General Sherman

Finally!  The Enterprise has left its repair diaspora, with a rebuilt generator and some additional insulation on the fresh water tank which we decided to add before setting out for the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Rockies.  Meanwhile, we took a three-day shakedown cruise to Sequoia National Park just to see if everything was working.  I'm probably jinxing it by saying this, but yes!  Everything worked.

The world's largest living thing (by volume), which you see above, is a Giant Sequoia known as the "General Sherman Tree"  because it was discovered and named in the late 19th century by a civil war veteran who had served with the General.   To get a true idea of its size, try to enlarge the photo (or use a magnifying glass) so that you can see the people standing at the base, which is about 36 ft. in diameter.  The bark is estimated to be over 2 ft. thick.  The adjective "giant" is not applied lightly to these behemoths.

As you might imagine, it took quite a while for the General Sherman to attain its present size -- more than 2,200 years by the best estimate.  So it's older than Jesus.  Anything this old which is still living if natural, or still functioning if man-made, has a special fascination for me.  In the man-made department, for example,  we have the Pantheon in Rome.  This building was originally constructed in 27 BCE by Marcus Agrippa.  It was subsequently destroyed by fire and rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian around 126 AD.  The building has been continuously occupied since then, and still bears the original Latin inscription above the front portico which translates as

         "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made this building when consul for the third time."

It has, to this day, the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, according to Wikipedia.  This is a truly amazing fact.  The Roman engineers designed, without computers (or even a decent system of computation!) and built, without any heavy machinery whatever,  a building which has lasted 2,000 years and remains  the largest structure of its kind in the world!  Of course by the time it was built, the General Sherman Tree had been happily growing away in the Sierras for two or three hundred years.  So the tree is perhaps more nearly a contemporary of Alexander the Great.  

Whenever I'm feeling old, I find it useful to think about the General Sherman and the Pantheon.  In fact,  I think it would be helpful to the world if everyone did this now and then.  Perhaps it would remind us that the past several hundred years, during which we have completely transformed the face of the Earth, is a small fraction of historic time, and of course less than a blink of the eye in geologic time.