Thoughts on Time

Time is a funny thing. Scientists can't even agree if time really exists apart from what we call time on Earth. Was there a beginning of time? Will there be an end of time? What is the nature of time? On Earth, there seem to be a beginning and end to all living things, including us humans. Observable stars and galaxies in our universe are apparently so old that the light we see left them billions or more light years ago. Scientists tell us that light travels at 186,000 miles per second. So light travels a long way in a year. By the time we see these stars and galaxies in our telescopes, they may have burned out and not even exist anymore. We don't know. So what about the stars and galaxies that we can't see?

On a more mundane level, here on Earth, time seems to be predicable and has to do with the movement of the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth. We can all agree on how long a second, minute, hour, week, month and year last. When you're a kid a year seems to last forever, but as you get older each year seems to pass faster. That makes sense, because when you're five, a year is a fifth, or 20%, of your life, but when you are 50, a year is only a fiftieth, or 2%, of your life. So the years seems to speed up as we get older. Still, in the grand scheme of things, considering the age of the universe, which isn't even known, even a relatively long human life span of 100 years is like a blink of an eye, less than a nanosecond. It's good to think about these things sometimes. It has a way of putting things in perspective.