Time paradoxes.

Today, while being a good sister and talking with my little cousin, I was asked an interesting question that’s been floating around somewhere in the air for a while, but never got formulated by far. At least by me. At least recently. At least in this form. The kid has started to show interest for the world history, philosophy and big historical personalities, so he asked me to help him understand a thing:

Now we, the people of future, always whine that we don’t have time for anything but sleeping and working/studying (well, the unbeatable majority of us). But the great personalities of all the times had these same 24 goddamn hours in a day, and anyway we have an enormous cultural background and technical progress created by earthlings like us, and this fact, unfortunately, excludes the possibility of having a day with a bigger quantity of hours. Moreover, looks like the past generations didn’t have such problem: the kid spent the whole night trying to find examples in the world literature and gave up. I can’t think of any right now, too. So why the hell we can’t get our shit done and have enough time to at least think about something out of the limits of our shallow worlds that often are equal to the walls of the room we’re in at the moment?

It looks like time is not a constant (hello, uncle Albert!). But it’s easier to explain, let’s leave alone poor Physics and the Big Crunch theory. We’re just getting smaller. Smaller, smaller and smaller. One day we’ll disappear completely, I swear. The flood of useless information makes us drown in it and flushes away all the idle attempts to break out of the shell that we’ve build ourselves. Being prisoned by the progress and development, we lose control and become useless brakes for this goddamn process of “becoming even higher creatures”. 24 hours? What’s that? I can close my eyes, open them and – voilà! – half of this time has flown somewhere down the wires inside my computer. Think of something eternal? Nah, if I do it, I won’t have time to watch that TV show. Create something? No way, I’d better sit and play this videogame.

And I’m not an exception, more like a vivid example: instead of doing something really useful I’m writing this stuff. And last year my letter to Santa sounded like this: “Dear Santa, please, take me to a place where there’s more than 24 hours in a day. 40 will be enough, I suppose. Always yours, Naive idiot.” I still dream about it, eh.

Time collapses, they say. Time collapses. A good excuse, dear scientists.