In the Interest of Time
I’ve never been to space outside of nightmares but distance is nothing to imagination. Every year on Mars is almost 2 years on Earth and it seems that each planet corrupts the temporal truth of the other with this difference. And if the amount of time in a year is malleable, can the year ever be defined in a way that is relevant throughout the universe? What is time to intention? As a result we may understand the earthly definition of a year to be painfully narrow and almost universally irrelevant. We also know then that we must place asterisks next to our measurements of weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as derivatives of this year.
Earth and Mars are closest once every 26 months, at which point they are separated by 34 million miles. If the feeling is that this orbital instance does not matter today in 2019, I’d like to caution against attachment to that feeling. The time to conceptualize an escape plan may very well be upon us. The world is dying, mostly because we’ve gotten too comfortable in our relationship with it. I know a woman who discarded a lover because he became too accustomed to a life of pussy and Postmates. It’s sort of like that. Humanity now sits perilously at a junction in which it must simultaneously seek to understand its own universal triviality and cultivate an upward-facing sense of manifest destiny. And a lot of that triviality is wrapped up in an emphasis that our earthly time is real and possesses a sort of governing power. In the eyes of our planet, humanity is no more significant than the worldwide ant population. We are in charge of very little besides the hurrying of our own demise. We’re also inconvenient the way ants are; stealing always and refusing not to even at the most basic level. Should humans number too many, the world will continue to warm until it eventually burns us off like a mole that signifies cancer. The world is not ending. Humanity is ending. The world will continue. And when it does, its longevity will not be measured in our days or our months or our years.
It then comes down to how badly we’d like to live. The movie 127 Hours begins with white letters on a black screen that read, “there is no force more powerful than the will to survive.” It ends with a man cutting his own arm off with a finger-sized pocket knife in order to escape from under a boulder. (Maybe next time he’ll take his cell phone with him.) There will come a time in a very near future in which the power housed inside of the force to live may propel us upward into the unknown. The state of the planet may reach a point so dire that humanity will face a choice between identifying a tangible solution or perishing. This theory has graduated from prediction to truth as of recent. We have surpassed too many critical thresholds. It is going to happen. The threat may only be delayed, not eliminated. But Mars has shown us great potential. Our exploration of the red planet now feels a bit like courtship in the way that it continues to reveal to us a bit more of itself each time we visit; something playful and cautious. In 2018, NASA discovered a lake beneath the South Pole of the planet that is 12 miles wide. For reference, the island of Manhattan is about 2 miles wide. Its importance in understanding the future and past of mankind make it one of the most significant discoveries in our history. It reeks of opportunity. God bless the third date.
And let us imagine that this opportunity inspires us to execution. Let us say that the rush to water rivals the rush to gold, and that someone or some group develop solutions to the problems in manufacturing transit and survival mechanisms. Ideally ones that will get us there and keep us there with the single digit amounts of explosion or vacuum related death. We would be served now to recall the nature of the previously mentioned junction that faces humanity in order to understand something that may spell our doom no matter how many planets we set foot on. The effort to truly understand our universal insignificance has a sky-high potential for failure. It is intensely difficult for the human being to consider himself meaningless, even when faced with scientific fact that renders him but a speck of dust in the vast expanse of space and time. One way he may mitigate this feeling of meaninglessness is with the projection of human social realities onto the universe, an inflation of self meant to help him find comfort in existence. The idea of visiting Mars itself is not excused from that narrative. Hypocrisy lives everywhere. He finds himself more than willing to turn a blind eye to the incongruencies between his social truths and the objective truths of the universe.
And time is nothing more than one of these social truths, created by mankind to accommodate for a lifestyle that begs for coordination. My friends wish so badly for me to stop reminding them of this, which I understand to a degree. It’s not very fair to forcibly disassemble something to which a subscription may never be cancelled. If you and I agree to grab a bite to eat at noon and I show up at 45 past, of course you have every right to be upset. Our definition of time in that situation makes me a dickhead. I can’t just blow off meetings at work because time is not objectively real. That makes me unemployed. With that being said, it is important not to conflate concepts that are important to humans — that come with social repercussions when they are not respected — with concepts that are important objectively in the larger scope of the universe. And in that way understanding that time is not real is quite liberating. Because it is objectively not real, there are moments in which one may free themself from the repressive forces that it exerts over the psyche so that a line may be drawn between the times where it has to be real and the times where it does not. If you’re at work by 9am and your meetings start at 2pm, understanding that time is objectively not real means avoiding looking at the clock until at least 1pm. There is nothing wrong with granting yourself reprieve from something so imposing as time, especially since it is socially conceived, constructed, and enforced.
To understand what this means going forward, it is important first to look to time’s past. Time historically has been socially malleable, which is by definition antithetical to objective reality. The Ancient Mayans used three calendars at the same time. One was made of 365 days split into 18 months each 20 days in length with one little vestigial month that lasted for 5 days. What kind of arbitrary shit is that? The second was made of 260 days split into 20 segments each 13 days. The names of these segments changed on a rolling basis. The third represented the cycle of the universe and was 2,880,000 years long, famously restarting on December 21, 2012.
In the early 20th century there was a push to change the 12 month year to a 13 month year. Each month would be 28 days long and there would be an extra month in between June and July called ‘Sol.’ George Eastman, founder of Kodak, insisted that his company subscribe to this new calendar. They used it until 1989.
The Chinese New Year does not fall on January 1st. Nor does the Jewish New Year .
Can anyone say which year was the first year?
In some dreams and some nightmares humanity reaches and inhabits Mars in a time where the pressure to be successful in this endeavor is immense. Let’s say the future of the species depends on it. It begins to drive business interests because survival at this moment in history is both incredibly important and wildly capitalistic. Let us understand in theory that the pressure exerted onto the human social sphere will be so powerful that life on earth must be transformed to better accommodate life on Mars. Lets us imagine some forward-thinking upstart stands up at a UN meeting (or whatever the future version of the UN may be) and proposes that the 12 Month year be amended to a 26 Month year, with the New Year falling on the day in which the optimal period to travel to Mars begins. I would not find it difficult to believe that those who lead coalitions upwards would rush to this idea. At this point, time on earth will already be obsolete, secondary to a new set of numbers that have now commanded paramount relevance due to their relation to our survival. And in this, our social truths will yet again be projected on a universal level, changing to accommodate the time in which the final frontier ceases to be final at all. Time is not real. I don’t mind that my friends hate when I say this. I don’t mind being insignificant among the stars. They will never concern themselves with human interest, no matter how hard we try.
And why be mentally repressed by something so unfounded, something that sort of comes and goes in the wind on a universal level. It rules our lives like a dictator that lives next door. We shouldn’t allow it. There are not many things that we can claim agency over relative to the universe, but one of them is the opportunity to consciously better ourselves. We’ve been granted human brains, obsessed with experimenting with their own essence. Untouchable shit baby. But time’s social imposition carries opportunity costs. They create barriers to certain emotions, ideas, and ways of being. I think we must grant ourselves access to these things through reprieves from time’s pressure. I see no reason to forgo those places for something whose only goal is to organize me along parallel lines of being with other people. There are types of growth that don’t come from that place.
A thing that I do is I turn the time in the corner of my computer from the digital clock to the analog clock. It’s small but freeing, if you’re into tangible takeaways and whatnot.
