Have you ever looked up at the sky and realized that you are essentially looking out into infinity? Sure it's possible that the universe has an end. That's simply where matter and space as we know it comes to an end, but beyond that there could be something even more indescribable and no one knows how far that goes. We look at the stars and catch only a glimpse of what's out there. Even with the most sophisticated technology currently in existence, we're basically looking through a set of binoculars down the road. In our lifetime we may never actually see what's completely out there. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be. Maybe there are portions of our universe that are never meant to be seen. We look up and start to get a sense of the incomprehensible vastness of all that is out there. Very rarely do we look inward at all that there is on the smaller scale. The universe is large beyond imagination, but micro-verse is just as large. It just happens to be operating on a completely different scale. Its size comes from how small it is.
Scientists don't fully grasp how things operate on the very large scale. Things that we take for granted such as gravity don't behave as expected when you start dealing with objects so big that measuring them is an exercise in itself. Even more strange is that objects that are so small they exist on the quantum level behave even more differently. There is a whole subset of physics dedicated to quantum mechanics and so far the only thing that everyone agrees upon is that no one fully understands quantum physics. So if something as fundamental as gravity can't be trusted to behave the same way with objects of different sizes, then what can we truly put our faith into? Are the laws that have been proved time and again really laws at all, but rather simply trends that tend to stay true given a specific set of variables?
Looking back at the dinosaurs I can't help wonder what this planet must have looked like to them. Not the landscape or environment so much, rather just the size of the planet must have felt somewhat small. There are over six billion people on the planet right now and while it feels big most of the time, we can easily see just what a small world we live on. We are just a fraction of the size of the larger dinosaurs. Remember what it was like as a kid and how big the world seemed growing up. Or even your house. It's not until you return later as an adult that you notice that it seems smaller, making you wonder if it was always that size and you just remembered it larger. It's hard to know just how many dinosaurs there were at any given time, but we do know they were around for a much longer period of time than we've been here. Could it have been that they saw their world getting smaller? They may have never looked up and pondered the size of what was beyond their world. Dinosaurs lived on the earth for millions of years. Man has only existed for several thousand. Our concept of history is so short in comparison to them. They're not entirely sure of how long dinosaurs lived, but it could have been anywhere from 75-300 years for some of the larger ones. The world must have seemed very different to someone several times larger than us who lived multiple lifetimes. Even some species today outlive us. There are sea turtles who can live to be 150 years old, which is twice as long as the average human. I wonder if their sense of time is different from ours. They live twice as long so does time move differently for them?
On the other side there are insects who live and die within days or even hours. The whole of their existence is summed up in what we consider to be moments. If a fly only lived for twenty four hours then each of those hours would feel like years to them. We even say there is a thing as dog years because as far as we can tell a dog's life is a fraction of our own. The point is that even something like time scales differently based on the one experiencing it. It's been shown mathematically that time speeds up as we get older. Well our perception of time anyway. When we're young and have only five years under our belt, a year seems like an eternity. Add another twenty five years to that and a year is considerably shorter. The days seem to fly by. I would imagine if we were to live twice as long if a year would feel more like six months by the time we reached fifty, which would still technically be young for our lifespan.
It would seem that both time and space are subject to change based on who perceives them. Does that mean there are no limits in either direction?
