Nimos
Well-Known Member
I posted this in another thread, relating something else, but it made me wonder, how people perceive reality.
As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.
But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.
So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed
So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?
As we know time is relative, so it depend on speed and acceleration. So if we take two identical watches and throw one of them in a spaceship and keep the other one on Earth. Now we accelerate the spaceship and let it go around Earth at the speed of light for a few days and then bring it back again, then the watch will show a different time than the one on Earth, in fact it will be behind. So time have passed more slowly for the watch in the spaceship than the watch on Earth. Now that is pretty weird, in it self.
But lets try to make it slightly more weird. Since that is true for the watches, its also true for us as humans. Even though we all perceive time equally here on Earth, we are actually living in different realities, your "now" is not my "now". the difference is simply so small than we don't perceive it as such. So now we are going to screw it up even more. So I put you in a spaceship and fire you into space at the speed of light. Now time is really going slow for you, so I age much faster than you. But my past is also changing compared to yours as I have more years of it. But it haven't happened for you yet as it haven't caught up with you. So when you finally reach your destination nothing really seems to have changed a lot for you, but I would have been long dead. And your perception of reality as you remember it, also doesn't exist anymore, but is in fact the past and not something that happened yesterday but maybe 100 of years ago, depending on how long you have been travelling for.
So lets make it even stranger. Now you arrive at you destination and encounter an alien race, which turns out to be humans from Earth, having developed faster than light space travel or wormhole technology and therefore reached the destination faster than you did, so basically you traveled into the future of humanity. So now your understanding of reality is completely screwed
So how do you see reality, is it individual or do we actually share it with each other?
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