How We Are Actually Viewing Everything in the Past

 by Isabella Frobisher

Everything we do, see, hear, feel, taste and smell vastly contributes and influences our perception of reality. Whether that be how we relate to our friends and family, how we go about achieving a task or how we let our emotions drive us and our intentions. It all comes down to how we perceive the world and our surroundings. Everyone’s perception changes and develops throughout their lifetime based on the more and varied experiences they have had. But wouldn’t you assume that time is also such a critical factor to our perception of the world? Surely it would be as we are so reliant on it on an hourly basis and it determines when events happen. Well, this is far from the truth, as your mind is actually the only being in the present. Everything else is from different periods of time in the past and thus, your perception and perspective of the world is based on different periods of the past.

Light travels at the speed of just under 300,000,000 metres per second. Therefore, if you were looking at a book on a table three metres away from you it would take only 100 millionth of a second (a microsecond) for the light from the book to reach your eyes. So you are actually only viewing an image of the book that is now one microsecond old. You are viewing it in the past; but your mind and eyes are processing and seeing it in the present. Even though this is only a miniscule of a fraction of time, consider another example, if you were having a conversation with two friends, one of which was three metres away from you the other one and a half metres away. You would be talking to one friend one nanosecond in the past, the other two nanoseconds. You would be talking and interacting with two different periods of time, both of which to you are in the present and to them are in the present.

Furthermore, in the previous examples it was only considered examples that only had a small distance but if you were to think about it on a larger scale like the stars in the sky a greater effect will occur. The closest one to us is the sun, which on average is 150 million kilometres away from us. It takes about 8.3 minutes for the sun's light to reach earth. Hence, we are viewing the sun 8.3 minutes old. If the sun was to just disappear and the only effect was that it just left empty space, it would take 8.3 minutes for mankind to physically see it. In regards to the moon, which is only 384,400 kilometres from the earth it would only take 1.3 seconds for us to notice if it totally disappeared. Additionally, each star we can visibly see in the sky are all different distances from the earth. The furthest of which is called Icarus and is 5 billion light-years from earth. Therefore, it would take 186 trillion years (1 light-year is equivalent to 37,200 human years) for us to notice that it had died. Thus, when you are looking up at the sky on a clear and starry night, it is highly probable that the majority of those stars have since died, possibly as much as trillions of years ago. But yet to you and your perspective, you are none the wiser as they are still glowing specs of light in the universe. In particular when you are looking up at the stars, you are looking at numerous points of time, many of which are before mankind and the creation of the earth.

In addition to this, because the universe is so expansive and the furthest visible star we can see is over 186 trillion years away from us, it is possible that other life forms or living creatures do exist. We just have not come across them yet as they are too far away from us in terms of when they were created. If one lifeform was on a planet that was 250 trillion years away (the light took 250 trillion years to reach earth from this planet) and life forms were created on it 50 trillion years ago. For the human eye, we would still have to wait another 200 trillion years until we would be able to visibly determine there were life forms present on this planet. If you think about it like this, it is possible that there are hundreds or thousands of life forms which we do not know about present in our universe, which could have been around longer than mankind has. Or if you think about the other way, earth and mankind are too new to another planet with life forms on it, that they are unable to see us.

So what does this actually affect in terms of our perspective? Well, your initial reaction will be that it will have more significance and importance than it actually does as it is such a peculiar concept to come to terms with: your mind is the only thing in the present and is actually processing things in the past as the present. However, this new perception of reality that you have just learnt about will have very minimal, if not any impact on the rest of your life. Your version of reality and how you perceive things will continue. But you will just have the awareness of how everything is actually happening in the past, but only very marginally and yet to you it is in the present.