Jan 4, 2023–To cut travel time, we focus on two options:
1) decreasing the distance between two points, or
2) increasing speed.
What if instead we could condense time? What if we could remove every other second, for example? Or at least remove the awareness of every other second? Then our time would be cut in half–our “experienced” time.
A two-hour trip would seem only one hour to the altered us.
Or perhaps the opposite is the answer. I’ve postulated that geniuses don’t think more–they think faster. They do more computations per second than ordinary thinkers. Similarly, great athletes perceive faster, allowing them to react quicker than us duffers. Facile politicians and successful business leaders make decisions more quickly.
What if you could speed up thinking?
How would that affect time? Would a day seem like a week, since the “fast thinker” would be doing so much in the mind compared to others?
Would a year last a lifetime?
Would a normal lifetime be eternity? Is this perhaps already happening? Is that why geniuses are tortured? They can’t handle immortality?
Back to my premise. How could we remove alternate seconds? Selective, periodic amnesia? Via drugs or implanted electrical device that stops synaptic activity, even at the millisecond level? For that matter, does our sense of time rest in the conscious mind? Or could we just turn off the timekeeper, leaving us fully functioning, but make a day seem only an hour?
If we could achieve this, would we choose to? Since it is assumed our aging process would continue apace. Would we trade a day of our life–even a boring day of travel–just to avoid the boredom?
Maybe we already have this ability to manage time. A way to cut a day in half, to turn a day into 16 hours. It’s called “sleep.”
What if we could change sleep from 8 continuous hours to alternate seconds? We could be alert continuously while still benefitting from the recuperative powers of rest.
I mean, how much of our minds do we need in order to stay engaged in most interactions of our daily life? Lectures, cocktail party banter, watching news, preparing meals, doing laundry. What if we could sleep while accomplishing those tasks, or go about doing them in Zombie mode–active, but disengaged?
Some might argue that we already do.
I can hear the feedback in my mind as I write this:
But… but… but REM… but physiology… but science… but relativity…
The point is to think What If. In essence, what if we could we live digital rather than analog?
Every moment is a discrete package of time, disconnected from the previous and following moments. Therefore what happens at Point A no longer leads to Point B. Instead we might be able to leap from Point A (awareness) to Point Z (sleep) back to Point B seamlessly, with no transition points.
I’m still working on ironing this out. Trying to spend a day leaping through time and space on a second-by-second basis. It’s exhausting, which kind of defeats the original premise.
I’ll get back to you on how it works out.
Or, get forward to you.