An explanation of the previous post

In the previous post (go read it first), I described a vision I often have. I also wanted to talk about what inspires this vision, but didn't feel like it would fit in with that piece of writing.

An image was recently released of the oldest galaxy in the visible universe. It is 12.8 billion light years away. Our own sun is only 4.5 billion light years old. When the light from this galaxy was emitted in a billion fiery nuclear furnaces, our Sun was still 8.3 billion years away from being a twinkle in the Milky Way's eye.

That galaxy no longer exists. At least, not in the form we can observe. Time has shaped it. Its gas clouds have condensed into stars and planets. Civilizations probably rose and fell. Stars spent their fuel and collapsed, colliding with each other and forming into black holes, and eventually there was darkness. But we won't see that for another 12.8 billion years, at which point our own sun will be dust in the galatic winds.

It takes our sun, Sol, 220 million years to make its way around the Milky Way. If you imagine each rotation around the milky way as a "sun year" (as we refer to dog years), that puts our sun in its prime at the age of 20. At just 45 "sun years", or 10-billion Earth years, our sun will run out of fuel and become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets.

The oldest known living tree was 5,000 years old when it was cut down unknowingly.

We already know the average human life span.

A female mosquito can live up to 100 days. Males, up to 20.

If a 20 day life of a mosquito seems irrelevant to us, just think how we must feel to the universe.

The speed of time

Sometimes I get caught up thinking about how the speed of time changes with scale. When I do this, I usually put together a short video in my head, in the style of a music video. I've had this vision in my head for a long time, and it kills me that I can't adequately portray it. Since I'm not a video editor, I will try to describe it. Read along and try to picture it in your mind. Throw some mellow, rhythmic trance music in, such as ATB.

We start out observing bacteria reproducing asexually, dividing with each steady beat of the music. Each beat, a new generation. Then a transition, the reproducing speeds until it's almost a blur, at which point we visually zoom out to see that the bacterial colony was on the back of a mosquito. As our time continues to speed up, the beating of the mosquito's wings progresses from a slow rhythm to indistinguishably fast. The camera follows the mosquito's flight, part of its short existence, until it lands on the arm of a child. We can hear the mosquito's heart beating at a normal pace, with the music, as well as the child's, which seems painfully slow.

Again, time continues to speed into what we consider normal. The sound transitions to the child's heart, speeding to match the old perceived pace, and the mosquito zips away. The camera zooms out to show this person sleeping under a tall tree in the mountains.

At this point, we speed up to match the pace of a tree's life. The transitions take on a more drastic effect as the child darts in and out of the frame in the blink of an eye, hanging a swing, playing, running, napping. All the while aging rapidly, for to the tree, this person's life is but the blink of an eye.

We also observe the tree's life progress at this fast pace. Growing, seasons coming and passing like night and day. As we speed time again, we watch an acorn fall from the tree and grow from the ground to grow into another towering giant, as well as many others in the scene. Time speeds up yet more, and we can see hundreds of trees growing tall and getting taken down, much like the bacteria we started with.

We can also see the ground shifting. Erosion levels the steep hill where a child once napped, and tectonic plate movement begins to cause compression ripples in the hillside. As the camera zooms farther out, time continues to speed, and we observe now an entire landscape change. Lakes form and drain, mountains rise and erode. Continents drift.

Zooming farther away, the Earth circles the sun ever faster, and becomes smaller with distance. Soon we're watching one of the long elegant arms of the milky way drifting around it's core.
Farther still, it's but one of 35 galaxies in our Local Group, our cluster of galaxies drifting through space together. At this time scale, each has its own active life. Spiriling, colliding with others. Little specs of light flashing in and out of existence as entire stars are born and die.

At this point, we zoom out to what looks like the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, a view filled with distant galaxies, and our own galactic neighborhood becomes indistinguishable from the rest.

UPDATE, 4/22/08: I just came across an animation out of Germany with a very similar concept called "Temporal Perspective". Check it out: