Short Life, Long Life
The other day I was driving home from work, slowly making my way through evening traffic beneath the sleepy warmth of a Southern California sun in it’s final few hours. Palm trees swayed gently in the breeze, rising before an expansive sky graced by twisting, wispy hazes of cloud not daring to obscure the secrets of the fading light. What struck me this particular evening, as I gazed at the ocean of azure, oceanic blue, and deep red slowly swirling before me, was that I was so grateful to be able to witness this that no matter what I would go through in life, it was all worth it. Just one moment of this beauty was enough.
It wasn’t the only moment that I had in life like that, nor do I think such a moment is necessary to understand the inherent value of life. Even without such moments I’m sure I could innately understand the beauty of life and what makes it all worthwhile. In any case, to me seeing something so wonderful, in any way that that comes, brings along with it the insight that life is good, and no matter how challenging or dark things may get, it is always good, inherently beautiful and there is a bigger picture that we should have hope for.
In that way, among others, I can see how it’s not necessary to measure life in terms of how long it is. If one moment can be cherished enough to make them all worthwhile, then the beauty of life is that it happened, not for how long it happened. Of course, I don’t mean that it makes sense not to be concerned with staying alive: giving up on life would be undermining it all. I just mean that it’s all worth it, every last moment, and we can see that in the beauty of the world around us, even in ourselves.
With that said, it’s interesting to me that different animals live for vastly different lengths. Greenland sharks are estimated to live for 250 to 500 years while some insects live for hardly a day. At face value it would seem somewhat unfair to the insects that their lives are so short. They just get so much less time to appreciate the world than their larger counterparts. Yet there is an interesting question here, about time and what it means to us, which may give us a hint as to whether or not the differences in lifespan between animals constitute a cosmic injustice.
We all intuitively know time as a number. It’s on our computers, our appliances and our watches. It’s plastered almost everywhere we go: on walls, TV screens, clock towers, basically everywhere imaginable. It’s “the time”. If someone were to ask how long something took we would respond with some quantity of minutes, hours, days, months or years, some unit of time. But what do we really mean?
Early forms of time were based on the sun. Sun dials rotated as the sun rose and fell. The ebb and flow of the events around us gave us some sort of relativity that we could use to coordinate amongst ourselves. Even without a sundial the rise and fall of the sun gives some universal reference point to the animals on Earth. There’s an important insight here though: that what we think of as time is based on the events in the world around us.
Time is still effectively universally based on the sun. The days are divided into hours, which are divided into minutes, which are divided into seconds and so forth. When we say we’re going to meet at 10:00 AM, we’re really saying we’re going to meet 3 or 4 hours (give or take, depending on the season and where you live) after sunrise. We just wouldn’t say it that way because it would make it hard to coordinate amongst ourselves, especially in our highly interconnected world. When we say it’s June 5th, 2026, we’re really saying it’s six months, five days and 2026 years after some point in the past.
Moreover, it might seem silly to wonder, but why aren’t there 10,000 hours in a day? Why don’t we have a single unit of time called a time unit, and every time that we have is based on that. Then we don’t even need months or years, hours or minutes, we could just report the time in a time unit.
It is possible to do such a thing and in fact it’s how computers work, but it wouldn’t really make sense: it would be hard to talk about and it would be inconvenient to share giant numerical values when we needed to coordinate amongst ourselves. That betrays an important insight: that hours are only hours for our convenience. There is nothing in nature that gives rise to the hour other than the rise and fall of the sun and the fact that it’s a convenient way for us to categorize the various moments of the day. What would seem so objective and empirical is far more arbitrary than you might think.
Then what do we really mean by time? Really, we’re just talking about the frequency of certain events in our environment and what we do relative to them. Which begs the question, if we were significantly smaller in size, say the size of an insect, and because we were smaller things in our environment happened much quicker, would the same amount of time for this smaller version of us be much longer than it is for the bigger being? Would the experience of an hour for this small version of us be the same as a month for the bigger version of us?
Why not? If we were significantly smaller everything would happen quicker and we would perceive things much quicker. We may even identify certain periods that occur that bigger versions of us wouldn’t consider notable enough to identify as distinct time spans. Perhaps the temperature change between early morning and midday would be a change big enough to be analogous to the rise and fall of the sun. Perhaps the rise and fall of the sun could be a big enough change to feel like the changing of a season to a small version of us.
I suppose what I’m saying is, if insects could have calendars, they most definitely would not be basing their days on the same hours or years we use. Their hours may be minutes to us. Their days may be centered on the temperature change from hour to hour, or differences in the quality of light that come as the angle from which the sun faces the earth changes over the day.
It also seems plausible that they would experience these moments of time differently. They’re smaller, and things in a small world more frequently, and quicker, due to the size and scale of what’s occurring. Imagine an ant feeling its way across a potato chip. How many times are their antenna and legs moving per second. How long is each movement of a leg or antenna taking? Compare that to a human walking through a grassy field, feeling the blades as they go. How long does it take their hand to reach for each blade? How many times do you think an ant’s legs and antenna could move in that same amount of time?
Since more is happening things would feel longer: the passing of time would feel different. Their short lives could seem very long to them. So perhaps life isn’t so cosmically unjust after all.