Complex Numbers

And Time Again

There are lots of subjects we don't fully understand. This is a good thing and it makes life interesting.

    We Still Don’t Fully Understand Time  

Interesting, but also amusing, because here's an article about time from Time. Or is that from Time to time?

In our everyday lives, time is a precious commodity. We can gain or lose it. We can save, spend or waste it. If our crimes are revealed, we risk having to do time.

Notice the phrasing in that last sentence: "If our crimes are revealed..." Not "If you do crime and get caught," no, straight to "You know what you did even if the authorities don't, yet."

To scientists, time is something we can measure. Clocks have, over the centuries, been the high tech artifacts of their era—the water clock, the pendulum clock, Harrison’s chronometer, and so forth up to the incredible precision of atomic clocks—marvels of modern technology, albeit without the evident aesthetic quality of more traditional timepieces.

You know, it occurred to me the other day that the first computers were clocks. When you think about it, they have the ability to compute the current time based on an input value (the time you set it at). I got this insight when I saw an astrolabe—a device that computes the movement of sun, moon, and planets—described as an early computer. But what's a clock besides a simpler astrolabe, one that only focuses on the sun with respect to the earth?

I guess it's a categorization thing, like with hot dogs or Pluto.

The article spends a few paragraphs going into the history of our conception of time, delving into philosophical, religious, and scientific matters, but not telling me anything new.

Then:

The traditional view, even among those who accept Darwinian evolution, is that we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree.

Yeah, that may be the "traditional" view, but there's no evidence for this egocentric idea. Not that there's any compelling evidence against it, besides pedantically wondering what "culmination" means, when we could be wiped out while other species (cockroaches being the most popular example) continue to exist.

But even in the immensely concertinered timescape that modern cosmology reveals, extending billions of years into the future as well as the past, this century is special. It’s the first in the 45 million centuries of Earth’s history when one species, ours, can determine the entire planet’s fate. We’ve entered what’s sometimes termed the ‘anthropocene.’

Actual scientists have denied the idea of the anthropocene,   but the name's stuck in public consciousness now, and good luck digging that tick out.

Perhaps our remote descendents will have a much-enhanced lifespan; they might even become near-immortal.

Or perhaps they'll lose capacity for cognitive function. We're already seeing that happen. Assuming, of course, that the collective "we" will have descendants. That "traditional view" up there assumes that evolution is about gaining functions such as what we call intelligence, but really, it's about genetic survival (that's simplistic, of course, but close enough for my argument). When "intelligence" stops being a survival trait, evolution starts to select against it.

So this is more of a philosophical essay on the state of humanity than anything meaningful about time. That's okay, though. I'd comment on more of it, but it seems I'm out of time.