I like talking about Time Travel. If that is not evident already, then either I'm dumb or you're dumb. Either way, let's talk about Time Travel and how it affects you. "But, Traveler, I have neither the technology nor the mental capacity to harness the power of Time Travel! Whatever shall I do?"
Aha. Well, I'm so glad you asked because that is exactly what we're going to talk about in today's lesson!
Whenever I try to lower my social standing and make it known what a huge nerd I am in public by bringing up Time Travel in casual conversation, people immediately start thinking of these guys and a DeLorean. While that is a brilliant major motion picture release glorifying Time Travel as the most epic of epic adventures, we travel through time in a much less epic way every day of our lives.
Before I illustrate a couple of examples of such, I'd like you to pretend that you exist in the middle ages. Your day goes: wake up, farm, farm, eat, cough, farm, farm, cough, farm, commit genocide on an indigenous people, farm, farm, eat, sleep. You lead a very exciting life. Ok, so now that you're heavily into the part, let's begin.
Example 1: I have a device here that I call a camera. With it, I can save a 2-Dimensional moment in time indefinitely. This is a perfect representation of what was happening from that angle and this moment in time is captured forever. I can travel backwards through time and see how the world looked at whatever time the picture was taken.
Example 2: I have this other device here that is referred to where I come from as an alarm clock. The day is separated into increments called hours, minutes, and seconds. Basically all it does is give a time-based structure to the day. Now, this alarm clock's basic function is to let me know the current time, but it has a more advanced feature. I can give the clock a user defined time in the future and it will beep when that time arrives. The usefulness of that is that if I wanted to only sleep for 7 hours, because I have extra farming to do tomorrow, I could set the alarm clock to beep in 7 hours allowing me to, effectively hibernate for 7 hours and arguably travel into the future at my own pace.
Example 3: Time zones.
There are many things in our lives that we take for granted that are, essentially, minor forms of time travel. Any recording you've watched or listened to, alarm clock you've used, time zone you've crossed, or any of the countless times you've played Chrono Trigger for the SNES, consider yourself lucky for having the time traveling luxuries that many in the past did not.
very well put. i also enjoy the unnoticed or even unappreciated forms of time travel.
ReplyDeleteI'm two hours in your future! Mwahahahahahz
ReplyDeleteA type of "Time Travel" which wasn't mentioned and in some ways quite literal- Telescopes. When you look at a star through a telescope you are glimpsing something that is at least 100 million years old. That star you're looking at could have changed, become a nebula or a white dwarf or a super-massive black hole. Who knows, for when it comes to stars, we actually can't see the present. Kinda makes time and space relative in that without phsyically going to a distant star, we will never know what it actually is at this very moment (not for another 100 million years from now anyway)
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