The Future Is Older Than The Past

Yes it can of course. But it's pretty elusive. I just question the popular notion that there is only the present moment, as not being fully thought through.

 

The future is so bright I gotta wear sunblock and dark shades, so bright, the future illuminates the darkest past, so bright, many become afraid of the light! Turn out that damned light! Who is paying the electric bills around here! Can't a guy get any sleep!

 

I don't know what any of this means.

 

If time is discrete (and there's no evidence so far that it is) then the present could be grasped, but we'd have to build some sort of machine to grasp it for us. Our brains don't work nearly fast enough.

 

Time is both discrete and indiscrete, which is why some mysteries are lost to time, while others are finding their way into the light of day. What's missing from this picture can never be lost, making up for lost time.

 

because the senses can be fooled, we invent machines that are impartial to our gullible subjectivity.
granted that doesn't stop us from trying to read them subjectively, but it does help.

the strangeness doesn't depend on our distorting the physical universe, but rather that existence is not limited to it.

 

the morning after the big ecopocalyptic speed bump will be.
but it will be a very different kind of world then an uninterupted continuation of currently unsustainable technologies might seem to suggest.

always there are things getting better and things getting worse. different things, all at the same time.
only way to avoid dissapointments is to avoid making big expectations based on anything familiar.

 

Dying is not things getting better or worse, it is death. End of discussion, end of debate, end of the species, because even species die. If you know dead people, you know they are not known for being great conversationalists or expressing much in the way of preferences.

 

those are the dice we are rolling. and they're kind of loaded against us. and we can do better then just rolling them. even if better doesn't mean immediate gain.
but that is the choice we are all making statistically.

when a big tree falls in the forest, all the little trees get more light to grow big.
we may not be the only species ever to evolve sapience, even on this earth.

so there are two kinds of morning after possible,
one evolves from other species,
the other, a fraction of our own survive by having mutated, for all practical purposes, into them.

there is a very good possibility of a near but incomplete "semi-extinction"

at this point, it seems we have passed too many very real tipping points to likely escape unscathed.
so the question remains how much can be salvaged and how much time do we have to make the changes that will salvage it.

in any event, the removal of the pressure of the burden of our current "civilization"
will result in a great restoration of the health of everything else.

if i could teleport into the future a century or even a few decades past the near/extinction event,
i most assuredly would.

betting on continuing to get away with our dependence on consumption of finite resources, i would not.

the thing is, the morning after won't have to start from scratch either, unless it chooses to,
and has a real chance of not repeating our same mistakes also.

not all will be lost, unless it is chosen to be discarded.

very likely there will be an impulse to do so, but there will also be secret scholars,
and the explorers who deliver to them treasures from the ruins.

 

Ivory Towers

Darwin was an academic with a stunted sense of humor,
Who insisted sex is all about survival of the fittest,
While Don Juan Casanova snuck into his wife's bedroom.
Knowing nothin' from nothin' ain't nothin' in Wonderland,
You gots to have something if youse wanna dance!
Superman just ain't superman if he can't dance!
The Big Bang creatively expanding to this day,
Surprises even overeducated eggsheads,
Who sometimes lay their own eggs,
And wake up with egg on their faces,
Proving, evolution promotes creativity,
Over, simply surviving from day to day.
Some say Darwin had a first world problem,
The common problem of over-thinking the problem.
In Japan today women are increasingly complaining,
Its hard enough to get laid in a country of polite workaholics,
Without having to compete with porn, VR, and transformer robots.
Blame it on the AI, blame it on fate, but the problem doesn't exist elsewhere,
While, first world countries still brag about survival of the fittest and their success.
Importing brides from around the world, all roads still lead to the ivory towers of Rome,
But, for some strange reason, money can't buy them happiness, or even children,
And, and many first world countries no longer have growing populations of their own.
Guilty feet ain't got no rhythm, voting the bums out of office is their only solution.
Too much of anything, is never a good thing, and they no longer know how to dance,
While their technology, wealth, and power keep growing into ever taller ivory towers.​

 

Believing we'd need to think faster, in order to grasp the present, seems to me to be imagining grasping it from the split second after it

I can't speak for anyone else but at any given moment I can stop and grasp the present. We're in it, our whole lives, it doesn't seem hard to do. Not compared to perceiving the future and recalling the past... Those things take effort!

 

I love these topics. The mind goes on a trip.

 

That's the theory of quantum gravity. Quanta pop in and out of existence in different locations, but in a probabilistic manner that inevitably leads to the world we know. These guys would be around the Heisenberg limit for how small anything can theoretically become, without possibly entering a "Mirror World" and growing larger again. Being that small means they can move individual particles around and reshape reality as we know before anyone has a clue what's happened.

For all practical purposes, they might as well be on the other side of the universe, because they are so small, and we can only guess what is happening at those sizes. Despite our measuring even things like neutrinos these days, which are almost nonexistent, to spot these guys at work we have to be able to measure both space and time scales that are vastly smaller still than the smallest things ever measured and so fast it might require an accelerator the size of the solar system to slow them down enough using relativistic motion to even spot them.

 

funny you mention neutrinos

i live near an underground neutrino research lab..have friends who have worked there

 

Tell them high energy physicists are all small minded.

 

Trying to compare the beginning and end of time is like comparing the smallest and biggest things.

 

From the day the sperm meets the egg, everywhere you go there you are!