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
