The Beginning of Life as We Know It

It's time to talk about time

Time. It's a simple idea, right? Twenty-four hours in a day. Sixty minutes in an hour. Sixty seconds in a minute. Tick, tick, tick, until you die.

Time itself has existed for hundreds of billions of years. Put simply, it is the indefinite, continued process of existence and events in the past, present, and future that cannot be sped up, slowed down, or otherwise adjusted. However, our concept of time as humans is not nearly as reliable. It may seem like our phone clocks are always on-the-spot accurate, but, in reality, they're anything but. Because the earth's rotation isn't always exact, the universal clock is adjusted by an average of 10-12 seconds each week. Usually these are seconds being added, meaning that we are literally stopping time - or at least the concept of time - on a weekly basis. In a sense, we are adding time to our own lives.

However, the we aren't the only ones with an inconsistent idea of time. Even our own universe may be working against us. Although it hasn't been officially approved, a well-known theory stated that, due to unnatural movement of land masses (i.e. huge, heavy cities in some places and dry wastelands in others) the earth's rotation is gradually slowing down. In about 10,000 years, it is predicted that the earth will take 25 hours to complete its rotation versus today's 24. This in itself would cause many problems in general (such as a 13th hour on our clocks that would only be used once per day), but it would also force humans to revisit our definition of time. If the Earth's rotation really did slow down, then, in theory, time would as well. But this wouldn't be such a bad thing, right? Wouldn't we all live longer?

Unfortunately, no. Although we'd technically live longer in days, the drop in Earth's speed of rotation would have an extremely devastating effect on our bodies. We'd move slower, have a decreased overall bone mass, and die sooner than we otherwise would have. Due to our planet's heightened gravity, everyone would weigh about 10% more, meaning that a 172lb man might weigh almost 190 pounds. Although our idea of time will probably change throughout the course of humanity, the invisible, ever-present force itself will not.