Age

So I’m pretty sure everyone here has thought about time and how it is an illusion. About how we humans created it as a tool to measure change, both observable and not.

With that being said, it would mean we don’t really age from “time” more so from oxygen and other pollutants or even minerals that we ingest. These things are obvious.

So if the Earth rotated on its axis more or less it would appear as us having more or less day/night.

This means that since people associate age and dying with time that rotation of the planet and “time” could be the reason ancients lived until 500-1,000s of years. Time is a state of mind, purely perception. We base our age and estimated dying off of how many times the earth rotates around the sun, it rotates on its axis 365 times before a full cycle around the sun, that’s a year.

Imagine if back then we had 6 hour days and 6 hour nights but just more frequent rotating on the axis, this would mean based off of a 365 day calendar being a year, people would believe they live until 200+ years old but die at the same age/rate as us, disregarding disease and death outside of aging of course.

I believe this could be a reason for ancients to believe they are older than what they think or are.

What do you think on this?

As you will be aware, different planets orbit their star(s) at different rates, and even rotate around their axis at different rates.

What then, such as with satellites like the moon relative to the earth, whose rotational speed and direction has come to match that of the earth so that we always see from earth the same side of the moon - what if the earth’s rotational speed and direction (signifying a day) came to match that of a solar orbit (a year)? If the same side of the earth faced the sun unchangingly through the year, the concepts of days and years would never have arose. Moreso still if the moon had this same rotational speed and direction with both earth and sun there would be no signification of passing months (which have been rounded up and down to whole days since calenders started being put together, but originally corresponded with the moon, hence the name “month”).

Discounting all issues with centripetal force versus gravity and one side of the earth being constantly freezing and winterlike + the other perpetually hot and summerlike and so on, what then would time be measured by? What would inspire the idea to measure time in the first place?

Needless to say, entropy would still exist and “aging” would be its manifesation in lifeforms. Despite all your mention of measures of time (or change) as being central to, or at least commonly associated with age, you seem to be quite aware that time measures are ultimately circumstantial and that the units we use are irrelevant to change and age occurring regardless. What was the intention of the thread? To open up discussion on perceptions of time and age in general? To seek agreement/disagreement? Or did you want to look at the ancients and their perceptions in particular?

Other than offering my thought experiment of specific orbital behaviour, I agree that time is a (useful?) illusion, it is the measure of change and its units are ultimately arbitrary, and it’s perfectly possible that ancients had much less precise and comparable notions of time to the modern ones we use today - resulting in bizarre mismatches in figures in some stories/accounts.

The real scientific pursuit behind all this though is, as I mentioned earlier, entropy. This notion is probably at the heart of what you’re showing interest in here.

I agree with what you have said here, time is a useful illusion most definitely. The main reason I made a thread was to discuss how ancients perceived time and what the possibilities are but I am interested in this concept in general, even modern perspective on it.

It seems that a lot of people are stuck in the mindset that time is objective and they confuse the tool with what’s being measured, Time and change.

I just found it interesting to think about the ancients because they said they had lived thousands or hundreds of years in multiple sources, usually religious ones, so I had thought maybe their perception was much different than our modern one in regards to time/change or perhaps the issue is that people take those sources/statements too serious/literal.

What sparked my curiosity about time is that Stephen Hawking was looking for a single mathematical equation or formula for time, that would show the beginning of everything. I just thought how would he find that if time is merely a perception, I thought perhaps he meant change instead.

That single formula I imagine would have begun with whatever the first reaction was. Time began when we created it but became a possibility as a tool/language with the first change/reaction of two or more variables.

I am interested in entropy and aging as well as understanding time and it’s many perceptions.

I think time is merely a relation of one movement to another. For instance I can drive to another town in 1/24 revolution of the earth. Aging is a process like planets following their path around their stars and just like my driving to another town in proportion to the rotation of the earth, my cells are doing what they do in the same proportion.

A good argument against time is the fact that light cannot come out of a flashlight until its destination has been found, just like any other “open circuit” can’t have a flow of current until the switch is closed. The light from a galaxy 13 billion lightyears away could not have left that galaxy until their destination paths into our telescopes, 13 billion years later, were found.

[i]At the suggestion of his thesis adviser John Wheeler, Feynman explained photon emission as a two-way interaction in which the regular photon is emitted and follows the “retarded” solutions to Maxwell’s equations. “Meanwhile” (in some rather abstract sense of the word indeed) a target atom or particle in the distant future emits its own photon, but a very special one that travels backwards in time – a type of solution to Maxwell’s equations that had been recognized since Maxwell’s time but had been ignored. These solutions were called the “advanced” solutions. This advanced photon travels back in time and “just happens” to arrive at the source at the exact instant when the regular photon is emitted, causing the emitting atom to be kicked backwards a tiny bit.

Amazingly, Wheeler and Feynman were able to write a series of papers showing that despite how mind-boggling this scenario sounded, it did not result in violations of causality, and it did provide a highly effective model of electron-photon interactions. From this start, and with some important changes, Feynman eventually produced his Feynman-diagram explanation of quantum electrodynamics, or QED. The curious time relationship continue in Feynman’s QED, where for example a positron or anti-electron simply become an ordinary electron traveling backwards in time.

Staying fully consistent with his own ideas, Feynman himself described photon interactions as always having an emission and a reception event, no matter how far apart those events occur in ordinary time. In his view, if you shone a flashlight into deep space, the photons could not even be emitted until they found their “partner” advanced photon emission events somewhere in the distant future. The proof of it is in the very slight push back on your hand that happens when you shine the light, that kick coming from the advanced photons arriving from that distant point in the future and nudging the electrons in your flashlight filament.[/i] physics.stackexchange.com/quest … a-receiver

That’s one of the most interesting things I have ever read in regards to time/light. It’s as if the light doesn’t even truly exist until it meets it’s opposite/destination.

Yup, it’s pretty cool! We exist relative to light and light exists relative to us, but what does it mean to say “light truly exists”? Light sees no time or space from its own perspective.

From the perspective of a photon, there is no such thing as time. It’s emitted, and might exist for hundreds of trillions of years, but for the photon, there’s zero time elapsed between when it’s emitted and when it’s absorbed again. It doesn’t experience distance either. phys.org/news/2014-05-does-ligh … -time.html

It doesn’t make sense to talk about time applying to the thing that defines time. And since all points are zero-time away, there is no concept of distance. If there is no time or space, then I can only imagine the universe being zero distance across, and zero distance along the temporal axis as well. So where is light existing? In a bewilderment lol