Well, it’s Monday again. Huzzah.
I don’t have much new to say. I still do not have my air conditioner, thanks to the frustratingly poor delivery logistics of FedEx®. I also have to blame the seller, of course (though I find the concept of blame mostly valueless) since they were the ones who advertised the unit as arriving between the 28th and the 30th of May (this year), and they failed to ensure that it would in fact arrive within their predicted time range.
Hopefully it will arrive today, and hopefully by the time I get back to the house I will have the energy to set it up. Usually at the end of the day I barely have the energy to change my clothes.
In other news, it was my sister’s birthday recently. That’s a good thing, and I’m glad she’s doing well. It would have been nice to spend it with her, but that wasn’t doable given my recent life events. Of course, I’ve said before that it’s a bit funny that we think of a person as one year older on their birthday, as though time applied to human age in quanta the size of one Earth year.
At the Planck scale time may in fact be quantized, but that’s a very, very tiny scale‒if memory serves, it’s the time it takes light to travel one Planck length*‒and for ordinary experience, the flow of time is continuous, though it is variable thanks to Relativity.
That got me thinking what it might be like if time did apply to humans all at once, one day a year. I think that would have some curious consequences. For kids, of course, it might be quite a cool thing, and they might look forward to each birthday enthusiastically‒especially around the time of puberty.
But for adults past their twenties, say, birthdays might become a thing of fear, or at least anxiety, and more so every year. Imagine that even the long-term consequences of illnesses and injuries only accrued on one’s birthday‒possibly at the exact anniversary of the time one was born. If you knew you’d been injured that year, you’d surely be dreading the birthday on which the consequences of that injury first fully applied.
Or what if you knew you were predisposed to some chronic complaint, or had a risk for some form of cancer, or of dementia, but you wouldn’t know if anything had happened until the time of your birthday? I imagine everyone would plan to go to the doctor the day after every birthday, at least once they had passed their twenties.
It’s an interesting idea for a story, perhaps. You could see people having birthday parties and the like, partly to celebrate and partly to offer support for their friends who were aging. There could be whole special rituals surrounding the process, especially as people got old enough to perhaps die when the year accrued.
And then there could be a weird, truly bizarre occurrence. Maybe one person would be found who, after aging “normally” his whole life, suddenly got younger at one year’s birthday, and then again at subsequent birthdays, as if there were some type of glitch.
Heck, even a person who aged continuously would be a freak of nature in such a world.
Anyway, that’s what I found myself thinking about. It seemed mildly amusing. I’m not going to write such a story or anything. At least I don’t expect to write it.
Indeed, I’m basically finished writing this for today. I hope you have a good day and a good week.
*Which is on the order of ten to the negative 35th meters. That means that there will be thirty-four zeros after the decimal point before there is any other numeral, so…a very small distance across which causality may act at the “speed of light”. Since the Planck length is 1.6 x 10-35 meters and the speed of light is about 3 x 108 meters per second, the Planck time would be 1.6/3 times (10-35 over 108) or .5 x 10-43 or just 5 x 10-44 seconds**. That’s way, way too small for us to measure.
**Or .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000005 seconds.
Robert Elessar 