Short.
Author: MattVerey
Composed: 18/1/06
Last modified: 20/1/06
Now, I've been getting complaints from some of you that when you read from me it's always 'death' this or 'doom' that, so I am writing to you now in an attempt to redress the balance.
On many occasions in my life I have heard it said that “Life is short.” Or other such observations like, “Life is too short to harbour regrets.” This presumption has a long history that I believe began with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who concluded in Leviathan (1651) that life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." I do not know the statue of Thomas, but around half of the people who I have met and have claimed or complained life to be 'short' have not been under average height for a human. Therefore, of the half over the average height that I have had the pleasure to meet and have made 'short' remarks, I assume are referring to the length in time of a life. Herein, I have taken it upon myself to examine this proclamation.
Back in the days (and place) of Thomas, it was still widely believed that the universe and hence time, had been created by God not-so-long-ago and would most likely end in the not-so-distant-future. That is, if humans did not shape-up and start behaving themselves they would taste the wrath of God. In 1650 the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, (1581 – 1656) published a monumental history of the world from creation to 70 A.D., and for this used the recorded genealogies and ages in scripture to derive what is commonly known as the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar which calculated a date for Creation from the Bible at 4004 BC. I can't imagine that the average life expectancy in England would have been very high in the mid seventeenth century, but even if we are generous with an average of 65 years, this is short when compared to 5654 years (AD 1650) with a few more years expected before the oblivion soon to be dished out by God. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a popular belief in the West was that the universe had been in existence forever. Life would then appear very short when compared to infinity. In fact, anything that was not infinite in duration would appear short, even stars on the main sequence, with a life expectancy of about ten billion years.
But these days, some of the brightest minds have created one of the most amazing theories based on some of the most expensive instruments that have taken the most accurate measurements ever, to put the universe at nearly fourteen billion years (which includes the commencement of time itself). In so doing, our lives have thus gone from meaningless to insignificant because if one assumes the average human life to be 75 years; but then scale the universe to say, just one year long, then we would live for a little under two tens of a second (0.17 seconds by my calculations).
Now, I realise that 'insignificant' is not a feel-good-about-yourself concept and I did promise to make this a more uplifting essay at the start. I wonder if you may now have asked yourself, “If the longest length of time is age of the universe, what then, is the shortest length?” A 1899 paper publish by the physicist Max Plank (1858 – 1947) listed a set of units including the one concerning us here which came to be known, not surprisingly, as Plank time. Prior to this, some could and would argue that time was continuous, which if you apply a variation of Zenos' dichotomy paradox (a fifth century BC Greek philosopher), would mean any human is then infinitely older than an instant! Or put another way, “One can not age.” Instead, it is now believed that time is discrete and that the smallest length is 53.91 billion billion billion billion billionths of a second or one Plank time unit. To try and out that into perspective, if the Plank time unit was one second and the average human life is 75 years (please pause here as Matt fumbles with an infuriatingly large number on his calculator), then the average human life span is one hundred million billion billion billion times longer than the current age of the universe! Where the age of the universe was calculated using 'normal' seconds as the unit time length. So, now I hope you see that life is not short when compared to the physical limits of time – according to theory. The actual shortest measurement of time is claimed to be one ten million billionths of a second. This works out to be a modest 55 million times longer than the age of the universe if this time period is scaled to a second and the average life expectancy is again 75 years. If you're finding this kind of comparison perplexing, don't forget there are nearly two and a half billion seconds in the average human life (of 75 years). So I think it's kind of cool to know that there is nearly as many seconds in a lifetime as there have been years gone since the beginning of the universe. Hickory Dickory Dock, The Matt scaled down the clock, The clock struck one, Say goodbye to the Sun, Hickory Dickory Dock.
While it's fun to quantify what is otherwise the subjective evaluation of short (at least it's my idea of fun), the numbers are so big it's almost impossible to appreciate them. We all know there is a big difference between what one thousand dollars will buy compared to one million dollars, but what difference is there between having one billion dollars and having one trillion dollars? Most of us couldn't spend it fast enough in a lifetime to know. And not for not trying.
The only meaningful answer I can give to the question, “Why does life appear to be short?” is that we forget our life. The older we get the more we forget. No doubt, for some people the rate at which memories are being lost is greater than they are being formed, if they are being formed at all. Besides, evolution has decreed that it is not efficient to remember every last detail in ones life. Indeed, it seems to have overlooked the need to remember even some of the important ones! Recording our experiences seem to be less important than having them manifest into and temper a bunch of 'rules' used for problem solving, social behaviour, ethics, etc that can be applied to a similar set of future circumstances. In fact, the formation of these rules and the emphasis that they don't contradict each other 'logically' is so important that some experiences would seem to go unnoticed by the person experiencing them. People will believe what they want to believe, regardless of the evidence before them. I would love to test the hypothesis that the perception of life being short correlates to an obstinate and forgetful mind. If only those qualities were quantifiable. Then we can get rid of all those short people!
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