You ever look up at the stars at night and feel really small? Somehow gazing up a the vast emptiness of space, and realizing that these teeny little blips are actually ginormous stars is humbling. I hope you enjoy that feeling as much as I do.
Most humans, however, don’t really ‘get’ the vastness of space. The range of size from tiny atoms up to the entire universe is immense. So immense, I argue, that humans really don’t have the machinery to understand it. We can’t even really imagine these huge leaps across the spatial expanse. Mostly this is because we, and our Earth, are only so big. And our eyes can’t see anything smaller than about 0.5 mm without a microscope. Our ability to perceive ‘space’ is limited by our biology.
Similarly, we are pretty horrible at time. Our biology also limits our perception of time in that we only live MAYBE 100 years and can’t really experience anything that happens in fewer than a few seconds. Yet lots of things exist outside those parameters. The big bang is estimated to have occurred about 13.8 Billion years ago. Atomic particles disappear and reappear in tiny fractions of seconds. We really can’t relate to those extremes.
This Episode is a discussion of Time and our ability to really understand much about it. We THINK it goes in one direction; forward. But we don’t really know. We like to talk about things that happened ‘millions of years ago’, but that doesn’t even register. We can’t even imagine much greater than maybe 1,000 of anything, much less years. So if something happened 100,000 years ago it might as well have happened 1,000 years ago – except for that’s not a very accurate way to think about the past. We can’t help it.
Probably the worst thing about time with respect to a human life is that the RATE at which it passes changes with age. It’s kind of what Einstein was getting at with his theory of relativity. When you are ten years old, one year is 1/10th of your entire life and so represents 10% of everything you know. When you are 50, one year is 1/50th or only 2% of your life so everything has been 20% devalued. What you thought was a big deal at 10 turns out to not be so important at 50.
Worse, when we are 20 we think we have all the time in the world. And we simply do not.
Necessarily, by biological definition, and our very nature, our time is limited. At least inasmuch as we understand time in 2022. Maybe time is a human construct.
That would be a relief.
As I approach 50 years of age I hope I can use the time I have left more responsibility than the time already gone.
Original post: https://chrisburcher.com/2020/09/25/kew-episode-22-time/
Direct download podcast audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/530563/5485765-kew-episode-22-time.mp3?blob_id=22362142&download=true
Direct link to YouTube Episode: https://youtu.be/XxjA6eCnFM0
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