h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd like to buy an argument... oh no, it's a Monty Python sketch.

Bumping around the internet and felt the need to debate... you were the most interesting prospect online...

So what do you think of... of... anything?

* in Jimmy Cagney voice *

Oh, so I'm a prospect am I? Ya got nuthin' on me, copper! Nuthin', ya hear me?

I don't know nuthin' about anythin'! You ask Two-Toed Tony Falluca! You ask anybody!

* We now return you to your regularly scheduled sanity *

*checks schedule*

Haven't got any of that... until... after the End of Time.

Hey that's it - will there be an End?

Time is an illusion caused the complex effects of gravitational forces on planetary bodies. If said gravitational forces were to cease or be radically altered (say by a Black Hole), time *as we know it* would probably End.

Those lucky enough to escape such a catastrophe (politicians, scientists, artists, cockroaches, mimes) would no doubt retain standard systems of time-keeping for familiarity's sake, but actual days might have little or no use other than for historical purposes.

So probably the most accurate thing to say is "tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis".¹

Mustapha

¹

If time is an illusion it would seem that when time ended the illusion would end. So what exactly do you mean by time *as we know it* (that being this delightful illusion) would end? Would some other illusion (lunchtime, perhaps) carry on?

Or am I just an idiot high school student who doesn't understand anything? Probably.

Hey, we were all idiot high school students at some point - I know I was.

There are a variety of time scales that we measure our lives by. Daybreak and sunset are just a small part of that.

Gotta go now, but I'll illucidate when I get back!

Although I don't respect the term 'idiot high school student', I have to laugh because the words 'high school' remind me of my favourite film - Grease.

I think I missed that, Al.

Aah, good, still here!

As I was saying, there over clocks we measure time by. If there was no day or night we would measure time by our internal body clocks - sleep patterns and so forth. If we somehow managed to escape a solar catastrophe, say in a giant ark/spaceship, you would have to keep time in order for there to be regular shifts.

This is all based, of course, on the notion of linear time, something that not all cultures subscribe to. The Hopi Indians for example believe that time can be measured by 'emotional distance'. The longer something stays in 'living memory', the closer it is to you in a chronological sense, regardless of whether in linear time it happened yesterday or a century ago.

Take the Holocaust. For those of us not of Jewish persuasion, it happened 50 years ago, a *long* time ago. But for those people who lived through it, and for their sons and daughters, because of the depth of emotion felt about it and the pain it causes them to this day, it may as well have happened yesterday.

Wow.

...I understand, too.

I think part of that - that something must be observed, or in this case remembered - to have *happened* for all intents and purposes - is a pretty modern concept for them to have known for such a long time.

Yep, it makes for an interesting clash of cultures - when indigenous peoples make grievances about land confiscations and stolen generations to Europeans who say "But this happened decades/centuries ago!"

And then there's the Israeli-Palestinian issue...

And the Northern Irish Republican/Loyalist issue, the Spanish/Basque issue, the Turkish/Kurdish issue, the Russian/Chechen issue, etc, etc.

Yeah... Though they're not all the same. I don't know if Northern Ireland is even the same category any more.

Well, violence in NI has always been about tit-for-tat. Catholics/Republican armed up to fight persecution by Protestants/Loyalists, the loyalists armed up to retaliate against attacks by republicans, they bombed us, so we'll shoot them. At its worst, the conflict was about innocent for innocent. At the moment, there is no tit so there is no tat. But the situation is still tinder-dry, and all it needs is a spark. Or a bunch of uncompromising hardcore fanatics such as happened in Omagh, and is currently happening in Spain with Etta (the Basque equivalent of the IRA).