People have a really hard time with things that exist on cosmic scales. We tend to think within the frame of a single human lifetime. 100 years is a long time f

People have a really hard time with things that exist on cosmic scales. We tend to think within the frame of a single human lifetime. 100 years is a long time for us. 1000 is so long that we don't even expect to have much information. 10,000 years might as well be 1 million for all we distinguish. There is about as much time between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and humans than between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus. If we took the entirety of the planet's existence and mapped it out on a single year, all of humanity takes place in the last 25 minutes of the last day. All of recorded history takes place in the thirty seconds before midnight on December 31st. The Triassic/Jurassic extinction event took place "in less than 10,000 years". That's longer than recorded history. The KT extinction took place over 5000 years. So "quick" is relative. We think in terms of weeks or months or years. But we're talking about a process that takes centuries or millennia.