Arbitrary Temporalism
I was watching Enterprise, and it occured to me, that although they’ve explained away the fact that most of the aliens speak english (Universal Translator) they never get to the idea of time.
What I mean, is time being an arbitrary decision. An hour is a collection of 60 minutes. A minute is a collection of 60 seconds. A second is…technically it’s a collection of milliseconds, but even so, it’s an arbitrary choice labelled sometimes as “a moment”.
Now Jupiter’s year is about 12 Earth years. However if there was sentient life on Jupiter and they’ve developed a different sense of time, then we’d have a whole load of issues with them.
If their hour contained 81.43 minutes and their day contained 13.2 hours, you can imagine what telling someone from Jupiter “Give me five minutes” would be like.
Overall, this isn’t a complaint about the show, it would make things ridiculous, it just occured to me that it’s so easy to get out of sync when it comes to letting go of preconceived notions like time.
Very odd indeed…
Tags: time, temporal, oddities, pondering
Originally published at Stressmint Dot Com. You can comment here or there.