Of all the ways to measure something time as we know it is going to be the most inefficient way to measure the distance between events. We put our entire mortality in a length of time. We scale our intelligence and maturity by it. I am sure that most of us have had a health issue that we related to our age by saying something like “I am not old enough to have this happen to me”. Some of us have said something like “When I get to be [of such an age] I hope I don’t get cancer or alzheimers”. If we were to take the linear aspect of time away from our experience we might expect to realize the same day over and over or we might be able to realize that a day is an event that doesn’t relate to time but a turn of the moon which rotates around the Earth which also turns as it rotates around the sun which also turns. We have all been conditioned to believe there is an appropriate time to sleep and be awake. My dogs don’t seem to get it but how can they, especially when they still haven’t gotten around to realizing the ass licking thing should not be done while company is over.
I am not going to lead into a rant how time is useless or ineffective because it is nice to have a measurement to determine when things will happen so we can know when to show up for movies or when we can leave school and avoid detention. (remember I only made it to High School)
I am also not talking about how we take human years and dog years and prorate dog years so we can compare us to them. Who needs to relate to their dog that much?
Back to what I was going on about the Earth and revolutions. Lets recapitulate: A good place to start is with a year. The year is 12 months which is usually 30 days half the time, 31 days the other half and 28/29 for some reasons I don’t know for one month. But at this point you can see how inefficient and we haven’t even gotten to the complicated part yet. Then we have 24 hours in a day (one revolution of the Earth) which breaks down further to 60 minutes per hour and another 60 seconds for each minute. The point I am going to make will be leveraged off the revolutions of the Earth and not in the minutes of our days.
Most of us realize an entire year when the Earth travels around the sun once which breaks down to 365 Earth revolutions before we start celebrating again. Now consider having been on another planet. The entire Earth calendar is not going to work. The most practical planet to live on besides Earth is Mars at this point which is much smaller. A smaller planet means shorter revolutions (days) and it is farther away from the sun (longer years). If people were to populate another planet would they actually age slower because of the long year or faster because of the shorter days?? Of course not!
What it really comes down to is the phenomena of time is over rated and use to gauge too much more than a measurement between events. We use it to indicate what illness we might be expecting even to the point of when we might find it reasonable to contemplate death. How many 20 year olds have a will??
Of course this is an over simplification of the subject as I have other shit to do. Just thought it might be interesting to go over as I find another way to put this in better perspective.
Check back often as I might have better answers to the problems of time.