Sweet Relief

It's priceless, that feeling you get when a potential tragedy turns out to be an innocuous nothing. When you start down the path of fear, tension rising in your gut, scenarios and their likely damages playing out like smothering narratives in your head, and then...relief. Whatever you were getting worked up about turns out to be wrong, misguided, or just infinitely smaller in scale than you'd imagined. It's cliche, but it's truly like a weight is lifted off of you, like the person stepping on your chest wandered off to find something more interesting to stand on. It's a warm feeling, but one impossible without the initial fright to console.

Which begs the question, which is better...feeling the relief from an imagined but unjustified scare, or never feeling that fear in the first place? I'd argue neither is better. It's the end that's important. In both cases you're happy, either because your happiness was never temporarily compromised by fear, or because you're relieved to have narrowly escaped whatever it is you imagined you almost didn't narrowly escape. In both cases life has worked out for you.

So whatever. Sometimes people get scared, and when they do it's fine to enjoy the relief that hopefully follows. And generally, given enough time, that relief will come.

The Clock Seems to Know I'm Looking

I've always had a mild fascination for strange time coincidences. There was a time back in high school when it seemed like at least once a week, sometime more, I'd look up randomly at a clock or my watch and the time would read, 12:34. Not that any particular minute in any given day is more significant than any other, but 12:34 only comes around twice, for two minutes out of the 1,440 in a day. At that rate, I should only see 12:34 when I randomly look at a clock 1.3 percent of the time. I was seeing it at a far higher rate.

Or was I? It could be that I assigned significance the the 12:34 viewing event and remembered it, forgetting every other time I glanced up, even absentmindedly, and saw some other time on the clock. In a given week I must glance at a clock or my watch at least 100 times. If one of those times lands me at 12:34, I'm safely inside the 1.3 percent window.

Or maybe I was conscious, however deeply, of the time when I looked. Since high school I almost never see 12:34 anymore, and it's been a long time. I think my mind, for one reason or another was looking for that time then. I had a running narrative which said, "I catch 12:34 on clocks all the time lately", and so, unconsciously I was looking for it. We have an internal clock which has been demonstrated to keep pretty accurate time. On some level I was probably aware of the fact that 12:34 was imminent, and, in an effort to keep my experience of reality in line with my expectations, by brain had me look up at just the right time often enough to render my narrative true.

But what prompted this entry if I don't catch 12:34 anymore? I was sitting here at the computer, waiting for inspiration when I noticed that my old, green Swingline stapler has the number 747 imprinted into the metal on it's front. I thought it was funny, the parallel of tiny metal stapler to huge metal airplane when I looked up at the clock on the computer. It read 7:47.

Sounds like the beginning of a bad Jim Carrey movie.

More on the Speed of Light

This is a favorite subject of mine, so I thought I'd delve a little deeper than I did yesterday. This may be old hat to some of you, but others might find it interesting.

The question I presented yesterday was essentially, "How can extreme distance cause the past to appear as the present?" To get a better fix on the solution, imagine we're all at a baseball game, box seats. A batter comes up to the plate, we'll call him Swingy McBallsmacker. He lines up, receives the pitch and cracks a home run out into the stands.

At that moment, if we're paying attention we'll notice that the sound of the crack of the bat comes a second after we see Swingy hit the ball. We've probably all experienced that, and we likely all know the explanation. Sound travels much slower than light, so while the light bouncing off of Swingy as he hits his home run reaches our eyes nearly instantaneously, the sound takes a perceivably longer amount of time to get to our ears. And the further away our box seats are from the action the longer the delay we'll perceive between the sight of the bat striking the ball and the resulting crack. In a sense, we're hearing the past, sensing with our ears an event that has already occurred.

Sound travels at 768 mph, or roughly one mile every five seconds. So if our box moved out to ten miles from Swingy and his triumphant home run, assuming our ears were sensitive enough we'd hear the crack 50 seconds after we saw Swingy swing. We'd be listening almost a minute into the past. But, assuming the glass windows of our box allowed us to telescopically see the batter from any distance away, even ten miles away we'd see Swingy's home run in realtime. Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. At that speed, even at 1,000 miles away the light coming from the action at the plate would reach our eyes nearly instantly.

But the point here is that light, like sound, travels at a finite speed. Like sound, if we got sufficiently far away so that we outstripped the distance light can travel in a given time period, we would sense the light from events, and thus see those events delayed from their actual happening. Imagine our box tore free from its moorings, lifted off into space and traveled a million miles from earth. Because of our telescopic box windows we can still see the stadium and Swingy's home run. However, we'll see it happen almost six seconds after the event occurs. Traveling at 186,000 miles a second the light takes about that long to reach us a million miles away. And the further away we are when Swingy knocks it out of the park the longer our perception of the event will be delayed.

Now imagine that our box is somewhere out in deep space, let's say one light year from earth. A light year is the distance light can travel in a year, or 6.87 trillion miles. Let's say we don't know anything about what's going on back on earth. We point our telescopic windows in the direction of the stadium just in time to see Swingy win it for the team. To our eyes the event just happened. But in actuality the light that allows us to see the event has been traveling toward us for a year. By the time we see Swingy smack the ball out into the bleachers he has long since gone home, finished the season, and started the next. In a very real sense we've just peered one year into the past.

Finally, scrap the box. We're now alien astronomers living on a planet 1o0,000 light years from earth. In the course of our normal investigations we train our telescope on a point of space that happens to be the surface of earth, inside a sports arena, where a strange looking creature with "Swingy" emblazoned on his shirt swings an elongated cylindrical object at a sphere another creature has hurtled at him. We make notes about this latest observation. We've been following the exploits of this distant alien culture for some time. However, our insights are tempered by the fact that what we're seeing took place 100,000 years ago. It has taken that long for the light leaving the surface of the earth to reach us. We have no idea what's actually going on for earth cultures in the present. That light is just leaving the planet. In fact, given the time span its likely that humanity no longer exists. 100,000 years is a long time, and while the human cities we're studying now seem strong and vibrant, a lot has happened in the intervening time. Cultures and peoples don't last forever, and it's very possible that the culture we're studying has died off or changed radically.

The point is, we're studying the past. We are seeing, in the present what happened to humanity, if it still exists, 100,000 years in its past. Swingy McBallsmacker is long dead, as is the game of baseball. If humanity still exists 100,000 years after Swingy's exploits it's likely unrecognizable. But we, alien astronomers living 100,000 light years from earth will never know. Or rather we'll have to wait 100,000 years to find out.

That's how extreme distance allows, and in fact forces us to see the past in the present. And it's further evidence of just how cool reality is.

Fun with Space Time

Let's say that you, at age 20 go out on a cloudless night with an immensely powerful telescope, aim it at another, far distant planet 50 light years away. Light, leaving that planet will take 50 years to reach you. At the exact same time, on that far distant planet a member of another sentient species sits out on a cloudless night pointing a telescope back at you. Both of you, looking directly at the spots where each of you are sitting will see nothing. Empty space. Because the light each of you are seeing left that point on the other planet 50 years before each of you got there.

So you see nothing, but, on a lark each of you waves at the nothing you both perceive.

Fast forward 50 years. You're both 70 now, and for fun you both return to the same spot you took your telescopes to fifty years prior. Nostalgically you look back to the same point in space where you once waved to an imaginary alien, an empty spot of soil. Amazingly you now both behold a creature sitting at the spot that 50 years ago was empty. They seem to be young creatures, both peering back at you through a telescope. Excited that your sight-seeing didn't return empty-handed this time you both wave excitedly. And, in seeming recognition of your gesture, the creature on either other end of the telescope waves back.

Of course that wave happened 50 years ago, and was in response to seeing nothing. But, in a sense, there is real contact in the present. At least in the minds of each of our observers. And that's likely the closest we'll come to traveling in time. But it's enough. The farther away we peer into the cosmos, the farther back in time we're seeing. It's very possible that one day we may find another sentient civilization in some far flung part of the universe. But we may be seeing things that happened hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of years earlier. By the time we find them, they may already be gone. But we can still watch their past. Observe them as our two stargazers observed each other fifty years in each other's pasts. We can observe but we can't participate.

Time travel is a spectator sport only.

Modern

I think the term "modern" is really interesting because of its constantly shifting meaning. Statically, modern can be defined as, "the historical period starting after the Middle Ages." That's the modern age. But that definition is skewed by our current temporal position. At its most basic level, modern means, "of or pertaining to present and recent time; not ancient or remote". That's a truly static definition that doesn't vary with time. But the experiential baggage that walks lockstep with the definition is constantly changing, and so, what "modern" means to me is very different than what it meant to someone twenty years ago, or 50 years ago, and certainly different from 150 years ago and farther.

I think we all tend to imagine our "modern" time as the best of all possible worlds. We look back at the past, see where we've come from, note all the improvements made to life since then, and almost pity those on the timeline less fortunate than us. We can't imagine how someone could have lived without indoor plumbing, or modern medicine, or the internet. On that point we can look back even fifteen years and wonder how those poor people managed. But imagine life in this country 150 years ago, before the industrial revolution. Before most of the enhancements to modern living we've become accustomed to.

Were those people miserable? On the whole, no. In fact they likely looked at their modern time and too imagined it as the best of all possible worlds. Because we as a species acclimate ourselves into the world we're born to. We're constantly striving to improve things, yes, because we always look to a better future. But at the time we look at the here and now and see it as generaly good. The major exception might have been Europe in the throes of the Dark Ages, nestled tight with the Plague. Those miserable, illiterate wretches likely didn't have a historical perspective, and simply new that the here and now sucked. For the most part, though, history has moved our species forward.

So clearly we know that our plum life is fleeting and that 100 years from now people will look back at us with awe and wonder that we were able to get by. "They had to physically type each word into their computers? That's so labor intensive!" "Achh! Traveling wasn't instantaneous? Where did the find the time to "drive" places, or "fly" to more distant points? Teleportation is the only way to travel." It's likely that even many of our labor-saving devices today will seem like a major imposition to future humans. We do the same thing with those same devices from our past. No reason to assume it would be different when we're examined by people 100 years from now.

I think it's a good thing that humanity tends toward excepting its lot. Life is difficult enough sometimes. Throwing in a constant, major dissatisfaction with life as it is would be enough to drive most people insane. Society works because we imagine that "modern" refers specifically to us, something that all those "past-ies" wouldn't get. Losers.