Time in relativity

Today, I’d like to talk about time. The running of it, the measurement, the awareness, everything.

It’s a running theme of my work in progress, ‘An Affinity for Hope’, and at some points, a key feature of the plot.

All my life I’ve been fascinated and fixated by the passage of time, more specifically the time we have between the beginning and end of our lives.

The specific feature of time I’d like to talk about today is the concept of time in relativity, and no I don’t mean the theory of relativity, I loved physics in high school, but I kind of sucked at the complex maths part.

I am talking about the concept of how long it takes from one moment to another, how much time has elapsed between one significant event and the next.

For example, let’s take human life, the average human life is about 82 years, which equates out to 30,000 days.

If you chunk those 30,000 into tens, then you can consider human life in 3 acts.

The first 10,000 takes you from birth to about 27 and a half, so all those rockstars that joined the 27 club only reached approximately one third of their life.

Now you can consider this to be sad, or you can consider that perhaps they didn’t need any more, that they lived their lives in a way that meant each day counted for three.

The next 10,000, taking you to 20,000, means you arrive at 55.

Now, I’m a great advocate of the idea that the middle 10,000 is the best third.

It is the time at which you are most likely to have met someone you love, the time you have the most friends, the most money, and from a morbid perspective, the time at which the largest amount of your family is alive. At the perspective end of you are more likely to have both your parents, as well as your children.

Finally, the last 10,000, the time that it takes from 55 to 82. This can be considered not as the end of your life, but rather the final third, the time to just enjoy being alive, enjoy what you have reaped out of life, for the good or the bad.

Of course, life and time is not nearly as linear and fair as this, some don’t reach the third act, some don’t reach the first. But of course, in all equal things, some live far beyond act three, in fact the lucky few reach 110, the elusive fourth act of their lives.

I exist within the first act still, my mother just breaching the third, but the important part to me is, whichever act you are in, consider your life at a value, you have inherent value solely through the existence of your 30,000 days.

What really got me thinking about time was when I was doing research for a project on the orbits of the planets in our solar system.

What caught my attention was Neptune, the beautiful blue in the sky, and since Pluto was ousted, the furthest planet from the sun in our little solar system.

Neptune’s orbit, as in the time it takes to travel around the sun, is 164 years.

Yes years.

As in what takes us 365 DAYS, takes Neptune 164 YEARS. Which in days is approximately an astounding 60,000 days.

Which got me thinking two abstract thoughts,

The first, if 1 year on Neptune, one rotation, equates to 60,000 days, that means that 6 equivalent months, or half an orbit is the exact same as one human’s entire life time.

82 Years.

If I am lucky enough to see three whole acts in my life, then I will only exist for the time it takes for Neptune to complete half a rotation around the sun.

Which when I consider that it does call into question, if I only had half a rotation left, only 6 months on earth, would I spend my life the way I do?

(Just food for an existential thought)

The second thought I had is a little out there so bear with me.

Consider the possibility that there is life on Neptune, and now consider that they too live on average 82 years, except on Neptune, it takes 164 years to complete one rotation.

So 82 years actually takes 164 times 82.

Which equates out to 13,448 years.

Which when you take it in days, because at this stage we have to;

13,448 years, an entire lifetime for the proverbial inhabitants of Neptune, equates out to 4,911,882 days.

Consider that for a moment, 4 million days, nearly 5 million really.

The sun rising, peaking, setting. Each morning, day, night repeated. Not only for 30,000 days over a 82 year lifespan, but 5 million days, over a life span of 13 and a half thousand.

The final calculation of course, the one that I fixated on, one that creates a significant concept in my book, is the question.

How much is my lifetime, 82 years, worth in relation to the 82 equivalent years on Neptune, the 13.5 thousand.

0.6%

My entire three acts, 82 years, 30,000 days, 720,000 hours, 43, 200,000 minutes and literal billions of seconds. Is worth less than 1% of the hypothetic life of a creature on Neptune.

So considering this, I leave you with a question.

Is human life the defining measure of time that determines what is a short, and what is a long life?