At 10am GMT it became 2019 in Samoa. Over 24hrs it will sequentially become 2019 across 24 time zones. Each zone a construct, as is the arbitrary notion that one year ends and another starts at a specific moment.
Which might give us pause to ask: what is our true place in time?
To answer this question we might compare time to space. Our understanding of space has drastically transformed over a series of critical moments. Moving us from the perception of the Earth as a flat planet, to a realisation of external perspective, and distancing.
So what might the equivalent moments be for our understanding of time?
Arguably our understanding of time is still at the ‘Flat Planet’ stage of perception. We base our understanding of time directly on our most apparent observations, just like the Earth looks flat at ground level, time looks linear and infinite and is still interpreted as such.
The first step beyond apparent observations of time would be reasoning. Luckily Einstein did the hard work on this — we can reason that time & space are interdependent in space-time, linked through relativity. Relativity on Earth is so slight that we fail to observe it, however.
The next significant steps in our understanding of our place in space was psychological rather than scientific. A phenomenon which hints at how our understanding of our place in time might also be driven by major epistemic shifts, rather than advances in science.
‘The Blue Marble’ photo of Earth taken in 1972 is one of the most reproduced images in history and became a symbol of the environmental movement. This single image depicts the frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid a vast expanse of space of our place in space.
In order to fully comprehend our place in space it seemed we had to externalise our perspective of space. Adopting an external perspective of time might not be achieved as literally as leaving Earth’s atmosphere was for space but it is far from impossible.
To externalise our understanding of time we simply need to accept that the world is made of events and not things.
Everything exists as an event somewhere between the ‘start’ and ‘end’ of the Universe. And so everything is impermanent, even the most seemingly permanent things, like Mt Everest. Everest is just an event (literally) unfolding in time.
To adopt this perception of reality, of ALL things, might shift our understanding of ‘our place in time’ to the same degree as The Blue Marble shifted our understanding of ‘our place in space’.
The final step is to not only externalise, but to distance.
The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ image was taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 (at the request of Carl Sagan) as it left our Solar System, and shows the Earth’s apparent size as a tiny dot against the true vastness of space.
Carl Sagan reflected on deeper meaning behind the Pale Blue Dot as:
“In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
A equivalent distance in time can be expressed by considering that life as we know it is only possible for one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, of a percent of the total lifespan of the Universe.
A view of time that Professor Brian Cox encapsulates as “the most astonishing wonder of the universe isn’t a star or a planet or a galaxy. It isn’t a thing at all. It’s an instant in time. And that time is now.”
In these four space-time analogies we might find the footholds and handholds that could allow us a means to scale the summit of time, and begin to understand our place in time.
To borrow poetic perspective of T.S Eliot, we should consider this moment an opportunity to know time for the first time.
“We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”
This knowledge of understanding our true place in time might, for the first time, afford us the understanding that:
We should not be focussing our collective efforts and ambitions in making more THINGS, we should in fact be making more TIME.
For time is drastically running out.
