How much time have we got?

How much time do we have? ‘To the naked eye’ we’ve got roughly from about .10 of a second to about 100 years. The first number is about the quickest reaction time we’ve got available, while the second number will probably be about the average approximate age that most of us will live by the time we get close to the end of our lives.

These times, from 1/10^th of a second to 100 years, are pretty much our ‘visible time range’. It’s a bit like our colour spectrum of time, running from our shortest time length, to our longest.

But, much like the colour spectrum, there is a great deal beyond that at both sides. Some of us can get a glimpse at part of that, for example some air fighter pilots (or gamers, for that matter) react that bit faster, and some people manage to live just that bit longer, but none of us can truly appreciate the grand scheme of it all without tools and a great deal of imagination.

For all intended purposes the whole range of time runs from about the age of the universe, which is more than 10 billion years, down to hugely small numbers of time, like attoseconds (one billionth of a billionth of a second, better expressed as: one attosecond is to a second what one second is to the age of the universe).

We can barely measure these numbers, yet they are hugely significant to our galaxy, just as radioactive radiation and radio waves are hugely important. This just shows how limited we are as a species. We truly only ever see one small range of one small corner of one tiny moment of ‘our’ galaxy.

What if there is a species out there for whom 10,000 of our years passes as one second? Or what if there is another species for which one second of our time passes as 10,000 years? As it stands right now, we probably won’t even realise these species exist, even if we run into them head first, let alone find any way to communicate with them.

It seems to me that we must re-evaluate our tunnel-visioned perspective of the reality around us. If we don’t, we’ll miss the stuff right in front of our noses, never mind the really difficult secrets.