By: Thanatos Gerroux
When we think about time, what do we think about? We think about time span units, don’t we? We think about time in relation to minutes, seconds, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, or millennia, don’t we? Sometimes when we think time we think about how long it would take to get from location A to location B. Sometimes we think about how much time before the hour ends. Sometimes we think about how much longer until Summer Vacation ends. At certain times, we might even try to calculate how much time we have left on Earth.
Is it possible that we’ve been defining time in the wrong way? Maybe time is a state of mind. Maybe this is all some sort of sick dream that’s been carried out for some superior life form (If you believe in that sort of stuff). Maybe time doesn’t exist at all. Can you imagine how horrible that would be? You base you life on the assumption that what’s happening is real. Can you imagine how crazy it would make you if you suddenly realized that the last fifteen years or so of your life never existed at all, but were some sort of dream that you, or some other creature for that matter, were having? What if you woke up and you were only three years old, and the twelve years of your life that you had lived since then were suddenly just one long dream, maybe only encompassing one minute of actual time (this is the average time for a single dream)? Wouldn’t that more than slightly anger you? All the school work you had ever done, all the breakthroughs and quantum leaps you had ever made in your life, every relationship you had carefully crafted – all of it was a dream, and time was distorted. I know that I would be more than slightly upset.
Does time exist if there is no one to experience it? If not one living being is here to experience the universe, does it exist? I suppose that question is rather like the "If a tree falls in a forest that has no living things to hear the sound of the falling, is there a noise?" sort of a question. It’s there, but if nothing can experience it, what does it matter? Maybe that’s the meaning of life – To experience the Universe and everything around it, so time can go on.
