Scary time.

For little American kids, the journey from the start of school in the fall to the next big event, Halloween, takes approximately eight years. Not so for adults. 

Hallowhine

As wise person once noted that life is like a roll of toilet paper; the further into it you are, the faster it goes. There's no better example than seeing how quickly life moves for adults than children. As I've noted here before, how could it be otherwise? For a man of fifty, one year is 1/50th of his entire life; for a kid of four, it's an entire quarter, and he doesn't even remember the first half. The kid would have no way to understand the internal reference of time's passage that an older man has. 

That's the scary thing about time -- you don't have to be Einstein to see that it's a relative phenomenon. No wonder even the ancients tried to invent timepieces. No one could agree on how long anything took. 

"You said this would be over in a short time!"  

"It was! Wasn't it great?"

"It sucked! And it lasted for ... a very LONG time!"

"If only we had some means of knowing how long things took, we could see who's right."

"There's the passage of the sun."

"It's cloudy."

"Well -- I'm right and you're wrong and it lasted a WHOLE LOT of time!"

I was thinking about relativity recently, Einstein's little killjoy for universal exploration. Before he got all smarty-pants about the speed of light and everything, we could think that if we only could make something fast enough, we could get to other stars in no time. Then Albie is like, "Wait, there's a speed limit! No going past C." And we were like, "Oh, man! At that speed, the next galaxy is more than two million years away!" And he's like "Sorry, dude. Better pack a lunch."

But it gets worse. Now we know that time would pass differently for the people moving near that speed than for us on Earth, moving at Earth speed. What kind of craziness does that lead us to? It's why space-faring capitalist companies like in the Alien movies would never work. You'd launch from Earth as an employee of Earthy McEarth Enterprises (EME), and by the time you got to your destination, EME had merged, failed, the pieces bought up, a new company planned, created to fanfare with various funding rounds, had an IPO, got absorbed in an LBO, the main company failed, tried to get a government handout, crashed, and everyone is dead because the sun went nova. 

Don't be fooled by so-called Universal Time. It doesn't apply to the universe. Is it ever the same time all at the same time throughout the universe? If at my house it's Monday, August 15, 2033, 8:09:12 a.m., is it something different all over the place? I can't understand it. 

Well, one thing young and old can both agree on with time, and that's when it's something fun, it's over too soon. And that's true on whatever planet you happen to be on.