TIME AND LIVING BEINGS
© November 02, 2006
How the time is related to living beings? To answer this question we have first to know what the scientific meaning of time is:
Physically, time is a fundamental component of the Universe in which all events occur in succession.
The term “fundamental” means that the time cannot be described by means of other parameters or by other fundamental quantities.
The measurement of time is based on natural events that occur progressively and harmonically in cadenza; for example, the swaying of a pendulum, the turn of a serrated wheel, the emission of electrons from a piezoelectric mineral, the emission of particles during the decay of radioactive elements, etc.
Time is considered like the fourth dimension of our Universe; consequently it is possible to be measured with different tools.
In olden times, the humans measured the time on base of the transit of the sun through the sky. Later, people took advantage of the projection of shadows and created diverse devices based on the shadows cast upon a plate marked with numbers that was placed at a 90 degree angle with respect to a gnomon whose shadow would be cast upon that plate. These devices are known as Sundials.
In our time, we have atomic clocks that permit us to compute the time with a high level of precision. If the clock of your computer is synchronized with the MSN clock, then you are circuitously making use of an atomic clock.
The modern theorists consider that time has not had a beginning and that it won’t have an end. To think that time will not have an end is easily comprehensible, but it is hard to think that the time in the Universe has not had a beginning.
If we go back toward the past and fractionate the time to the half each time, we will find that the time is infinite toward the past because there will be always a positive fraction of a second of time.
We will never get a real negative quantity of time. We only find the negativity of time in abstract formulations, but never in the real world.
We use negative quantities of time for convenience in our mathematical notations. For example, we write down 10-3 s, which means that we have a fraction of 0.001 s. You can follow the progression down by dividing 0.001 over one billion and you will never get a negative fraction of time.
There is no time zero, which means that our Universe did not started out from nothing, but from something and at one moment in time. We say that our Universe begun at 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001 s (10-37 s).
I was saying in the previous paragraphs that the time is the dimension of the Universe in which occur all the events; from now we will see how the time is important for living beings.
There is not a chance for zero in time because no thing can flow from the nothingness. The only thing that can sprout from the nothingness is nothingness. Thus the things, the nothingness has never existed, and if it existed some time, then it would be nothing, but something.
The living beings started off from something, that is, from matter that had been produced in an asymmetry of the Universe. This is different to say that the living beings can be formed from abiotic matter when the ideal conditions are given. When those ideal conditions for the emergence of living beings cease, then the living beings can only be produced from other living beings.
If there would be the possibility of a time zero, the present time would also be zero and, consequently, we would not exist because without time no cosmic event would occur, including the Universe itself. The expansion of the Universe would not occur and there would be no time for the formation of the elements that would shape the compounds needed for the emergence of living beings.
The living beings on Earth started off some 9.5 billion years after the Big Bang. If the Universe were 4.5 billion years old just now, we would be not here yet. If the Universe’s life-span were of only 9 billion years, we would not be here either, and the life in this Universe would never have sufficient time to emerge.
I know that some people say that there could be other worlds older than our planet, where the living beings could have started many millions of years before than us; however, for them the Universe would be so dense, so symmetric and terribly compressed that the "life would be impossible for them", ha, ha, ha. You can be certain that any living being, or any civilization, that had come out on any world in the first five billions of years of existence of the Universe has already disappeared.
Our Universe -and all the universes- started out from a black hole that was formed in another Universe bigger and older than our Universe. Thus, the life in the Universe only can emerge when the density, the polarity and the distribution of the matter are less homogeneous, and the fundamental laws are accurately homogeneous.
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