time
The Real World: Attending To The Here And Now
This is the typical human problem. The object of dread may not be an operation in the immediate future. It may be the problem of next month’s rent, of a threatened war or social disaster, of being able to save enough for old age, or of death at the last. This ‘spoiler of the present’ may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been ‘cleared up’ and the future is bright with promise.
There can be no doubt that the power to remember and predict, to make an ordered sequence out of a helter-skelter chaos of disconnected moments, is a wonderful development of sensitivity. In a way it is the achievement of the human brain, giving man the most extraordinary powers of survival and adaptation to life. But the way in which we generally use this power is apt to destroy all its advantages. For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.
What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become ‘now.’
If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
~Alan Watts
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- True Awareness: Introduction To Alan Watts & The Zen Mind (tomazomc.net)
- Alan Watts – Out of Your Mind (promienie.net)
- What’s Wrong With Our Culture (philosophers-stone.co.uk)
- Awareness and the Now (time2dreamblog.com)
Quantum Action Policy
From this quantized eBay™, humans can order, for an equally astronomical fee, packets of time to dilate their day or night. . .
Any mass object warps the spacetime surrounding it and drags spacetime along with it, causing a perversion of time. When someone wishes for more time, he or she should spin as close to the speed of light as humanly possible to increase the surrounding gravitational waves, therefore slowing time. Such that, anyone observing this “dance” (a sort of gathering momentum) will perceive the spinner as slowing down. At the point where the observer screams, “Wow! Is he/she ever moving slowly!” (or some equivalent exclamation) the spinner can stop spinning (having conserved enough momentum) and carry out the remaining tasks of his/her daily routine, comfortable in knowing he/she has now enough time. I recommend a policy be enacted into Physical Law that at certain intervals of the workday, the entire planet could spin rapidly to near the speed of light. The accumulation of energy of every Human Being equaling the entire mass of Earth’s population should slow down time for the entire planet simultaneously. If we could somehow conserve this energy, those who were on the night side of the planet could use their extra time during their daylight and vice versa—a system of lending a continuous supply of extra time. Careful monitoring would need to be implemented to ensure that no single individual spins before his or her allotted interval, throwing the entire planet into a maelstrom. This average of interactions create the perception of Time. From this quantized eBay™, humans can order, for an equally astronomical fee, packets of time to dilate their day or night. The morphing of time could be a commercial venture. Imagine a stock market determined by time rather than digits.
Never Enough Time Factor
Einstein’s theory says that uniform motion is relative. So, the Earth’s population could decide en masse to simply stand still (rest is a state of motion), effectively decreasing their velocity, acceleration, and motion to zero. This would remove the distribution of seemingly chaotic (a symptom to the Never Enough Time factor) events and human entropy from the equation of Time altogether. As the universe expands, it would drag humans along with it, stretching time out to infinite proportions relative to human perception. Much like the notion of singularity associated with falling into a black hole, and time will simply unfold before us, infinitely.
Cosmic To Do Lists
Huge amounts of Dark Energy can be utilized to accelerate the Earth to as close to near the speed of light as Earthly possible. This will slow down time enough that all the clocks on the planet will slow to a virtual stop, and all Humans will now have plenty of time to check off each task on those cosmic To Do lists, like repairing that leaky faucet, fixing that running toilet, filling in that nasty hole in the attic wall, completing the work in the Inbox at that job, reading all those new WP blog posts in that reader, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Stretch Spacetime
If the expansion or contraction of spacetime, and consequently the expansion or contraction of Time itself, is correlated to density, then this would mean that the more humans gathered in a particular spatial geographical region, the perception of Time at that position would increase proportional to the level of attraction (gravity) and the distance relative to each person in the area. The amount of persons herded at one position is proportional to the perception of time. This proportion increases at the rate of assumptions relative to the volume of references to Time in communications. Therefore, with a cosmic density parameter, Ω0, equal to the mass of herded persons, spacetime is stretched, as well as all references to time itself.
One Final (Disturbing) Recommendation
Sir Isaac Newton postulated the Law of Gravity by the following equation: where F = the gravitational force, G = the gravitational constant, 6.67×10-11 Nm2/kg2, m = mass of an object, and r = distance between m1 and m2. Distance is measured relative to time. The concept of time is perceived relative to some other object; therefore, Time is an illusion. If time is an illusion, then distance is also an illusion and r = 0. If r = 0, then there is no gravitational force.
In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein wrote the following equation, referred to as Einstein’s Field Equations (EFE): where Gαβ = curvature of spacetime as determined by the metric tensor, and Tαβ = stress-energy tensor. Solutions to EFE are metrics of spacetime, which constitutes the universe. If there is no gravitational force, then Gαβ = 0, and there is no spacetime curve problem. However, that would also mean there is no universe. As such, my final recommendation is that I promptly wink out of existence.
*Image Credits (used through CC license)–
“Pi: The Transcendental Number” by Tom Blackwell
“Salt Pan Stereographic Panorama” by Martin Heigan
“Warp Core” by GarlandCannon
Hyper-Sky” by Frank Hg
“Multiverse” Image by Kevin Dooley under Creative Commons license
“Corn” by Klaus Friese
“Hypnotiq No. 71” by Shane Gorski
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Persistence of Memory
The Wave Of The Future
“I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in the future of the future.” ~Robert Doniger
WHERE WE WERE
WHERE WE ARE
WHERE WE WILL BE
Credits (for Where We Were)–
Clips (All clips are in public domain):
“How Our Country Grew”, Prelinger Archives
“Soybeans For Farm and Industry”, Prelinger Archives
“Miracles In Agriculture 1960”, Prelinger Archives
“Atomic Bomb Test 1955, Stock Footage
“Nuclear Test Review 1945”, FedFlix
“Hydrogen Bomb Test 1952”, Stock Footage
Music:
“Babylon” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com
“Blipotron” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com
Image:
“Photography is a drug” by RHiNo NEAL
Related articles
- Free Stock Footage (philbradley.typepad.com)
- Thumbs Up For Free Music Archive and Prelinger Archive Mashups (wfmu.org)
- Soar (nikotheorb.wordpress.com)
- One World or None (1946) (publicdomainreview.org)