Start 0f 2 0 2 4… What a great time to open a random blog and discuss about the concept of time, now that everyone is putting faith in the new year and hoping to receive happiness.
This article doesn’t use ChatGPT or similar textual AIs in any way, I decided to write it completely on my own, with the help of DeepL to correct translation errors.
Hey Erik, 2023 really sucked for me, I can’t wait for December 31, so that 2024 comes and at least I can hope that the next year will be better.
~ R
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve come up with the idea that the common thought among people is that, on December 31, if it was a good year, we hope for a year that is equal in happiness or even better, and vice versa, if things didn’t go well, we want to move away from the old year and put our trust in the future.
Personally, I didn’t do much on the last day of 2023, I was still weighed down by the family Christmas lunch cooked by my beloved Italian grandmother (the stereotype is true, if you know what I mean).
Let’s start with the simple things: what is 1 year? There is no single definition of what a year is unless we specify its type, and we can cite among the examples:
365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. But how? Doesn’t the earth’s rotation last 1 year? Yes, 1 solar year. Since we are not smart enough to count years with this precision, we approximated them using the Gregorian calendar. However, it would be something like “Tonight at 04:45:57 (random hour by the way) everyone up celebrating the rotation of the earth around the sun”, and that wouldn’t accurate too, because in the world there are 24 timezones in total, so people in the world have 24 different New Year parties for 24 different moments.365.25 days (365d 8h) because it’s a cool number: SPQR, Ancients Romans!It’s important to specify that the year is a human-defined measure and it doesn’t exist in nature (it was defined from the earth’s rotation around the sun but the universe is so vast that we are nothing in comparison). There is no clear distinction between one year and another in reality, and in no case as if by magic will one year necessarily go well for us and another year go horribly wrong because of fate.
What is certain for US is that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, creating a cycle that in the long run gives rise to a stream of earth days, and WE perceive the days this way.
However, this is only our point of view.
Let’s take light as an example, which travels at approximately 300,000 km/s (the Earth’s equatorial circumference is ~40,000km, so light speed is something like going around the entire Earth 7.5 times every second).
In the duration of a Julian year, a photon of light travels through space 1 light-year (this is also a convention established by man).
Now, to simplify Einstein’s theory of relativity (don’t kill me if you’re a physicist please), if we ourselves were that photon of light (which, let’s remember, seems to be an absolutely massless particle), for the human observing us, our path lasted 1 year in HIS passage of time, but for us who moved at the speed of light, that year would have passed in a moment, we wouldn’t even notice it, because from our point of view, time flows much faster.
The year is such because we observe it that way, but if we traveled at a high enough speed or lived near an object of enormous mass (e.g., black hole), we would have other units of measurement for time because we wouldn’t even notice the passing of 1 Earth year.
If we approximate the duration of the universe to 13.787 billion years, as scientists have estimated, and compare it to the entire history of man on earth (about 2 million years ago), we realize the huge difference between the 2 numbers: 2,000,000 vs. 13,787,000,000 years. Comparing it in %, we can say that the history of all humans, from the first ape to us, occupies only 0.0145% of the life of the universe to date, and, our life span alone of about 100 years is practically insignificant, corresponding to 0.000000725% of the history of the universe (many 0s, right?).
To make the idea better, if we consider the history of the universe as a 24-hour clock, our entire 100 year lifetime (hopefully, at least) corresponds to 0.0006 seconds (less than 1 millisecond).
Are we important enough for this millisecond to be remembered in the future compared to the other 24 hours, or will it take a few years and everything we have built will be forgotten? Since the great ancient Romans, only 2000 years have passed (or 12 milliseconds in our virtual clock), they were the masters of the world, yet of all the people who lived during that time, we barely remember a couple of things we learned in school about Julius Caesar. So much has happened in this short period of time that it’s impossible to know even a fraction of it, and the people of the future will behave the same way with us: we will be the people whose information has been lost over 2000 years, and our computers will be the archaeological finds used to reconstruct information about our society (it’s not a coincidence that GitHub made a copy of all the open source code, putting it in the middle of the ice).