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Can time exist without life?
I have been discussing the existence of time with another member of the site, Argento77 which resulted in a very philosophical (hope i used that correctly) conversation...But we still haven't come to a definite conclusion so we want to hear your views on what exactly time IS.
what would time be without clocks...day and night
what would time be without day and night...seasons
what would time be without seasons...life
what would time be without life?
Thats as far as I got. Argento also raised an interesting question about whether time is a subjective or objective phenomena. Open to discussion
what would time be without clocks...day and night
what would time be without day and night...seasons
what would time be without seasons...life
what would time be without life?
Thats as far as I got. Argento also raised an interesting question about whether time is a subjective or objective phenomena. Open to discussion
Comments
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Hi Royal Gala. Wow, really interesing questions. I'll try to answer your questions, but they are really difficult questions. I'm no Einstein, so I'll see what I have to say. In MY opinion, time is an objective matter, despite Einstein's claim that time is a relative force. From the little bit I know about Einstein, he claimed that speed is relative to time. In other words, time is different for each and every person, depending on their individual state of motion. Therefore, time is subjective, according to Einstein. But in my opinion, time must be an objective matter, since each person experiences time equally. Hmm... Time is a very difficult concept to grasp, I think. Perhaps time as we know it, in terms of calendar units, such as years, months, days, etc. are just the best way we humans can explain how time is measured. I might add that some philosophers do not even believe in time. If there were no clocks, would time be measured? Maybe not. But will it exist? Probably yes.
One philosopher stated that, if one does not experience something, then that something does not exist. If we use his reasoning, time would not exist if we did not exist. However, if I stick with my opinion that time is indeed objective, then it must be the case that time is constant regardless of whether there is life or not.
Yes, this is philosophy, without a doubt. Philosophy just about encompasses everything that has to do with existence, knowledge, experience, ad inifinitum (knowledge is infinite, remember?)
Thanks for the interesting questions. We should really get this thing flowing on TalkSFU and see what other people have to say about this stuff.
Cheers
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This is now open for discussion. Let's get everyone talking!
Additionally, time can exist without life. How do we ultimately define time? By change. A change in some property of an object from one measurement to the next which yields a "before" and "after" shows that time has passed.
Thus, technically, time would effectively halt at Absolute Zero because no motion would be possible. Since there would be no way of differentiating the state of an object at one moment from another moment, there would be no time.
Now, the question of whether time is physically meaningful to a bacterium is another issue altogether, but the point remains, that the absence of conscious organic life does not remove the passage of time itself from having occurred.
After all, we humans retroactively apply our interpretation of the passage of time in understanding how changes in the Earth's composition relate to the degree to which a certain event is removed from our "now". It can be argued, I think, that the time sense in terms of eras long ago is primarily for human convenience, or if it is the case that only humans can make sense of the concepts of past, present and future in a long-range, abstract sense.
Objective versus subjective.
In a sense, both are correct. Spacetime collectively provides an "objective" measurement of the interval through which something passes. However, in relating the time component, that is subjective, since it depends on external conditions.
Think of it in terms of the past, present, and future: the past is already gone, the present is now, the future is not yet. You could argue everything being defined in terms of the past: you reading this post, me writing, and everything in the history books. However, you can think of time as subtle changes of the past: every instant, something is added to it and the past encompasses a slightly larger number of events. This pretty much what NukeChem said aobut change and bacteria sensing hydrogen sulphide.
Ultimately, time is objective if you remain on Earth. The only subjectivity lies in how you perceive it. The older we get, the faster time seems to us. A year feels the same as five years when you were younger. But the fact that a five-year-old and a seventy-five-year-old are equally is subjected to the same amount of time, say, for a year still stands--they just sense it differently, that's all. Hence the objectivity is there in terms of the same time passing; the subjectivity is there in the sense that each person senses it differently.