Timeline
The Timeline Thought Experiment
Every one of us has a timeline
The universe has a timeline that began with the Big Bang and will continue into the unquantifiable future until the last neutron decays. After that, there will be nothing to record.
For practical purposes, we can consider that our personal timeline begins at birth and ends at our death.
Imagine a strip of movie film with individual frames that will record every moment of your life. Each of us will have a different record filled with moments. We each did something during every moment even if we were asleep or watching bad programming on television.
If we assume that it takes replaying 30 frames every second to produce a moving picture, then each moment could be 1/30th of a second since anything faster than that would be beyond our ability to see. There is little use in recording a smaller unit since it would be beyond out perception.
Faster events must be recorded on the Universe's timeline, and it would have to be broken into units so short they could only be described using scientific notation, since a quadrillionth of a septillionth of a second doesn't mean much to us. Recording quantum particle activity will require a separate timeline for each particle, but that is far more philosophy than quantum mechanics, and this is a thought experiment, so forget the hard core stuff. (whew!)
Our lives are made up of moments. Thinking about the previous paragraph took about ten seconds of my life. That's about 10x30 or 300 moments, so I just filled up 300 consecutive moments on my timeline; 300 consecutive frames of sitting silently while thinking about something . It can be stored as analog or digital data, but it's easier just to think of movie frames. A ten second movie.
Since we were born, our imaginary timeline has been constantly recording our moments from our first cry at birth and it will continue until we die and beyond, but we'll stop with death. The Universe will have to record the dissipation of my component atoms when they stop being me
Ahhh..death. Something that happens to other people.
According to Wikipedia's List of countries by life expectancy, the average life span varies from 50.1 to 83.7, years depending on where you live and a list of other guess adjustments. To make the math easier (another adjustment), we can use 80 years here as our life expectancy.
Eighty years! There are 31,536,000 seconds in one year (use the Forget Leap Year adjustment), so that gives a massive 946,080,000 moments every year! Astonishing!
In our lifetimes, we have 75,686,400,000 moments!
75 billion moments!
Now, the purpose of all this is to ask one question:
What have you added to your timeline in the past hour? Today? Last week?
At some point in the future when you look back at your timeline frames for today, will there be anything on it worth making you pause to review it again and get a nod of mental satisfaction?
As you near the 75,686,399,500th moment, will you look back at number 37,700,000,000 and have a warm feeling because you remember that moment when you made your first parachute jump, or got a hard-earned promotion, or finally bought the cryptocurrency that was to enrich your children? Were you writing your book? Were you having a long break with your significant other?
As the next step in the thought experiment, suppose that frames which had no particular effect on subsequent frames began to fade as their lack of importance made them less relevant to your life. Now, as you look back, there are long stretches of blank frames; thousands of blank frames interrupted by a few hundred faded and mostly unreadable frames that convey nothing, and those followed by ten thousand more blank frames.
Where is your life to review? What happened that made an entire year fade away? Faint impressions here and there, but what happened? What were you doing?
Where are your recent years? You remember watching television now and then, but there seems to be little evidence left; nothing but blank frames. Suddenly back down around the 32 billions there are bright, colorful frames with images of a jungle shoreline, your dearly loved one running towards the surf...and a behind that, you were building a green house in the back yard together...and then her wedding dress.
What happened to the more recent years? Why are the memories no longer there? You don't actually remember making memories, but surely you did things to remember and they should be recorded back down the timeline. Why are there so many blank frames?
Now that it is too late to use it, you ask what happened to your life? What did you do to remember and what did you do to leave behind to prove that you were here?
How much of your timeline is already fading because you did nothing to focus on the moments as your timeline passed by? Why did you not make memories to be treasured?
Why?
When was the last time you paused to look at a tree as a fellow traveler with its own timeline, or to listen to a bird, or to thunder, or your child, and focus on that moment so you could pin it to the passing frame of your life?
The frames pass whether you use them or not. There is not an endless supply and you do not get do-overs. If you do not live in the moment, the frames will pass unrecorded.
Carpe diem
Image from Pixabay
Well that does get one to sit up and do some thinking. What indeed do we do that will echo into eternity? What will flash through our minds at moments of severe destress, what will be our most prised and vivid memories?
We do often just let time pass by as if we have got lots of it to waste, we don't and every millisecond is getting us closer to the end of our time here during which we really can achieve a great deal if we apply ourselves. Even small levels of energy and effort count but frighteningly many people just sit and let time pass without it accounting for anything.
Yes indeed, even sitting listening to a Turtle Dove in the late afternoon is a better use of time than mere mental vegetation.
Good to give this topic some thought more often.
Agreed, @petesays. Doing mindless things that have no output other than passing time is such a waste of the true gift we have by being aware of the world around us. Instead of reading to improve one's mind, some watch embarrassingly bad television designed to turn anyone into a moron. Why do that when it produces nothing but blank frames?
I often go stand on our back deck in total darkness to listen to the night sounds of frogs and crickets and see the fireflies and smell the damp- organic aroma of the surrounding forest. I cannot remember all of the times, of course, but I do remember the accumulated joy of being in nature, and that counts.
One of the reasons i arise so early every day is that I like the solitude of the morning when the world is still asleep but nature is in full speed ahead. I almost daily take a cup of tea out in the darkness and stand at the deck rail for as long as it takes to drink the tea, just to enjoy. I can usually hear an owl, four different kinds of frogs chirping like birds, an occasional coyote in the distance (recent invaders from the Western US), and Whipporwills, as dawn approaches. That is better than anything TV could offer me.
Someday, as often happens in the final moments, I may need to quickly review my timeline and the more moments there are of hearing birds and frogs, I'm certain the more satisfied I will be with a life well lived.
And now, there is even the beginning possibility of creating a timeline on the Steemit blockchain! A simple version is scanning down the postign thumbnails can reflect your past activity; each with a written dialog should you want to stop and read about the day.
We actually can collect daily snapshots of our timelines! How cool is that!
Very well said Willy. I must say I prefer filling my moments with listening to the wonders of nature. Sadly these days in SA we also have to spend our time wondering what next and it takes a lot of the beauty out of life.
Bless you man, have a gooden
I read a lot about the changes in SA and the implications. I have been hesitant to bring it up, but I am aware. Not a good time with drought and shadows of Zimbabwe.
I just wonder if people around the world really understand exactly how severe it is here. Apart from the fact that the members of government have robbed the country blind to the point where they re now trying to tax their very small working class to death we have been receiving warnings of late that our power might get cut due to strikes at Eskom, our power supplier.
The voting masses unfortunately don't simply go on strike though, the very same things they are striking for are the things they set on fire. Want schools, burn the school down. Want healthcare, burn the hospital dow. Want education, policing, power, hell everything gets burned down here, even other people. I wish it was just drought, we could still fix that if we had the government on our side and listening to anything we have to say. Armed robberies, rape and murder has become the order of the day. Oh and be careful defending yourself as you might end up in jail instead of the criminal.
Enough for now, I think you get the point. Off to work. Have a gooden
Can you recommend any web sources with valid local news? I like to keep informed
The news here is only selling their version of events. Check on reports from Katie Hopkins, Lauren Southern, Aussie foreign affairs minister Dutton and Senator Fraser Anning. The dictatorship style governance here is getting out of hand and the violent racial outbursts made by members of our parliament are acted upon by their voter
Thanks for the references, Pete. Now, Plaasmoorde has more meaning after seeing the hillside covered with crosses. So deeply sad...and senseless.
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Another interesting post my friend. As I get older this rings true more and more. In fact part of my time on here is about writing my life story for the permanent blockchain record hopefully allowing future generations the opportunity to read for themselves and who knows possibly remind me about when I'm old and knackered. Writing the good memories has been extremely beneficial for me and allowed me to realise that I did live life to the full sometimes and those times are the times we remember most and cherish as you said. I endeavour to continue on in this vain until I no longer can :)
I made a post two months ago stating the same reasons; "My reason for using Steemit is... was to use the Steemit blockchain to preserve that part of me I can manage to get into writing to create The Archive of Will. This seems like as secure a place to keep documentation that will be widely available and not get lost by people are not as concerned with preserving my past as I am. I have been keeping a journal for over 20 years and a lot of my past is embedded in those 6,000 pages!
I have somewhat of a technical background and have done work-related research as well as personal genealogical research and have learned the value of written records. I'm getting over the need to have my literary brilliance adored by the reading public and can spend more time preparing content for the blockchain that are the building blocks of my life.
Kudos to you for having both the vision and desire to preserve history. My gut tells me that it is the things you and I write that will have the most value to society in the very long run. Very, as in a few centuries ...or millennia.
Too bad there is no way to get a complete DNA code posted along with it!
Work towards that, young fella!
Thanks willymac. I'm not very technical but am learning all the time. Maybe I will first bury a time capsule with some hair trimmings and the like. Getting a DNA code posted may be as simple as pressing a button soon enough. I'll remember in the future if not.
I don't think they have fully decoded the human genome yet and it would be too expensive to have one done anyway, so waiting would be best idea.
I did have my mitrochondrial DNA decoded by Oxford Ancestors a few years ago to verify my family origins, and that was pretty cool! (Yep, that's the word...shows when my language patters were formed) Good to know i'm from an uninterrupted stream of women back 23,000 years to the general area of Northern Spain. I keep that in the "for what it's worth" drawer.
HINT: Save a tooth along with the other samples. It has the most durable structure for protecting DNA.
Wow. This is one of those posts u read and use some precious moments on ur timeline to ponder. The contemplation of time as recorded by the universe is mind boggling!
Yeah, our perception of passing time is a strange thing. As you sit and ponder it, it passes and there is little chance at all it will be important enough to make a permanent frame on your timeline, no matter how hard you try to make THIS moment one to remember. After ten million more frames have passed by, what are the chances of remembering this moment?
A cruel gift from nature to allow us to record moments in memory but not gjve us tools for retrieving them. All kinds of interesting thought material there!
interesting post! i enjoyed reading it.
i am a data storage person by preference and all my years in the industry teaches me that snapshots are as natural as existing. in fact no self respecting application can be written without continuous snapshots.
so if i apply that here, then all your blank frames got missed but the ones worth remembering made it into the snapshot. our life is a intermittent set of snapshots that we care to remember.
i guess blockchain makes that possible in some way. but snapshots are not transactional. they are really summarized viewpoints of an infinite timeline. a window perhaps that is aggregated and crunched up into what we perceive as reality.
this quote by lewis carrol is perfect for the occasion:
Exactly my premise, @adarshh. We pay little or no conscious attention to most of the moments of our lives, leaving blank frames in the timeline. We may make a mental note that "I went shopping" and that is enough to fill a frame, but the details leading to that summary are lost, leaving blank frames. We end up with sporadic recorded memories interspersed among blank frames.
If we could visually inspect our timeline record it would look like mostly blank film with occasional images that clustered around more important events that actually captured our attention.
We may well perceive reality in summary notations but that still means that we are slow to synthesize and translate our inputs into coherent thoughts that are then recorded. We get much better when our adrenaline kicks in and we have contiguous moments of clarity that are recorded in living color. Imagine being able to remember everything with such clarity!
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