Another Spin On Time
It's obvious that time is both relative and absolute, it just depends on how we experience it.
It's also obvious that time flows regardless of our awareness of it.
Although it's more understandable to say we're immersed in the environment we live in just as a fish is immersed in a body of water.
The latter is tangible and visible while the former appears to be invisible yet omnipresent.
Maybe this is also more factually correct than saying we're immersed in the air we breathe in just like a fish is immersed in a mixture of water and air that we call an aquatic ecosystem.
On a different sense, I think this is also how we're more or less immersed in time.
And like the fish that isn't aware of the water surrounding it, it's easy to forget about how time envelops our entire existence.
Of course, a counterargument can be time is merely a human construct, especially from a modern perspective.
I don't need to be reminded of the passing seconds on my watch nor do I have the luxury to ignore deadlines and schedules.
But to a large extent, this is dependent on cultural and social contexts and for the most part, I think our relationship with time reveals much about how we perceive reality itself.
Let's visit the movement of the sun as the main measurement of time. In reality, the Earth moves around the sun, and technically sunrise and sunset are just our own way of perceiving our planet's rotation.
Of course, the sun is also moving around the galactic center, but infinitely slower than the Earth moving around the sun.
Cosmic Time, Sort Of
If the sun is a star, then all other stars are individual suns, in theory. I wonder outside of this solar system, how time changes or is perceived by any perceiver that's outside this solar system.
It's already known that Mercury is much faster in its orbit, compared to Saturn, for example, which takes 29 Earth years to complete one revolution around the sun.
When we consider cosmic time, our human perception becomes almost insignificant.
A star's lifetime spans billions of years, while geological processes unfold over millions. And we mere mortals measure our lives in decades, years, days, and seconds.
This disparity in scales reveals how arbitrary our time measurements truly are.
Ancient civilizations tracked time through lunar cycles, seasonal changes, and stellar movements. Before mechanical clocks, time was organic and cyclical rather than linear and precise.
A farmer concerned with growing seasons experienced time differently than we do with our digital devices constantly reminding us of each passing minute.
Perhaps time isn't flowing past us so much as we are moving through it, like travelers on a journey.
According to Einstein's relativity, time and space are intertwined, and the forner can dilate depending on velocity and gravity.
Is time a dimension we move through, or simply our perception of change? Without change, would time exist at all?
A universe in complete stasis could be termed timeless, hinting that time emerges from the relationship between objects in motion.
As we spin through space on our tiny planetary home, our understanding of time will evolve and a theme that remains constant is our desire to make sense of our temporal existence, between the perceived infinite past and the endless future that stretches before us.
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