The Speed of Time

The clock has improved its poker face. Tough time telling time what to do. Time moves forward because it takes less energy than moving backward. Undoing is far harder than doing, ask any atom. Movement, mistaken for time, we say things like ‘spinning’ but if a boat spins on a lake, spinning is sending out ripples and waves and inspiring spinning in others and starts to carve out a groove in the water making spinning cost less energy over time. We see empty space like pointing a microscope at the night sky, but it has never been empty, not even a little. Moving, spinning, turning, fusing, bonding, metabolizing, this singular instant we call existence is not static or still. It looks like ‘forward’ movement but that is an illusion. This is a single transcendent moment in which the past and future are both physically present, otherwise they do not exist in reality at all and are purely abstractions. Adding a layer to time is easy, and happens organically, removing a layer of time is incredibly difficult, almost impossible, and would require lots of energy and a shovel. 

So time is simple, it is physical, and it is not uniform, it speeds and slows, gains weight and loses it, and can be manipulated with great difficulty, because time is a physical action. Movement. Every orbit, every spin, the constant centrifugal force pulling us all back into the earth. It is the physical movement that ages us, the constant pull down of gravity, like it craves us. 

There is a theory about travelling at the speed of light that involves the traveler being gone a single year but that many years may have passed for those remaining on the earth. I think that time simply compressed in the perception of the traveler, like flying over driving, but no substantial distance actually changed. The traveler is moving faster, but the outside of the spacecraft is feeling the full amount of time, same as the amount back on earth, compounded in the friction against its hull and physical distance through space. The spacecraft is protecting the traveler from feeling the effects of that much distance and movement, creating the illusion of time travel, when it's more like time-fast-forward on a VHS tape.

Moving forward in time has your heart beating and lungs inflating, your next meal and water source and the safety of your shelter from one year to the next. Actions progressing in series to accomplish fundamental needs and reacting to an ever-changing environment that further reinforces the feeling of the passing of time. But we are in an eternal moment. The past is buried beneath our feet and recorded within our very anatomy, and by studying and understanding the past, you will be able to form ideas and glimpses of the future. The human imagination is the closest thing to a time machine that will ever exist. Not because we lack the capability, but because the hypothetical technology is founded on a false premise of time as if it is some kind of recording of existence, not physical existence itself with all of its weight and physical properties. 

Going backward in time would have to undo all the actions that we consider moving forward in time, which would require more energy than will ever be available in the universe to go back a single second. Moving forward, less energy, but the same issue, and you wouldn’t be immune to the impacts of distance and movement, some kind of ship or container would have to protect you from those external impacts in order for you not to age yourself as you moved into the future.

If you want more time, do less. If you want to understand the past, get a shovel. If you need to know the future, get a shovel, and try to understand the past.