It’s artificial you know. Time I mean. The ancients used the movements in the heavens and the conditions they observed on earth to define it. Over millennia it has become marginally more scientific. We know why the seasons change, why it gets dark, why the moon changes shapes.
There is no dragon eating the moon.
But in terms of our understanding of the universe, to borrow from Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” The end we have gotten to is realizing how little we know.
But we do know we circle the Sun. All of us. Together. We tell ourselves that modernity has made the world smaller. This is an absurdity, not just because of the obvious physical laws that would be violated, but because something cannot become that which it already is…the world is vanishingly small. Our longest lasting space vehicle has been travelling at a rate of speed that would circle the globe in about forty five minutes. It has been on its journey for forty three years and it has not yet left the influence of our Sun. And there are billions of stars like our sun out there.
The Somalian pirate is on the same trip, in the same space as Taylor Swift. Joy Behar and Donald Trump are seated next to each other. There are no upgrades, no VIP packages. If a civilization advanced enough to actually find us, observed us, the cognitive difference between a human being and say, a mosquito, would likely not even register.
And yet, we tell ourselves lies because we need them, even if they kill us all. We play up differences between humans when in the cosmic scheme, there is absolutely no difference. We argue whether gender matters. We argue whether religion matters. We argue whether race matters. When the truth is, the human race doesn’t matter.
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