Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: forward Thinking. Welcome to forward Thinking. Everybody, it's time for
Speaker 1: another podcast. My name is Jonathan Strickland, and I am
Speaker 1: joined by Lauren Vock Obama, who is shaking her head
Speaker 1: at you, and Joe McCormick, who I made some horrible
Speaker 1: noise when you never mind. All right, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I make a time joke. They both grown. Because we
Speaker 1: are talking about time today, and we're talking about time
Speaker 1: and relativity and sort of the challenges that we're going
Speaker 1: to have in keeping time in the future. And you
Speaker 1: might think, well, the thought we'd got pretty good at
Speaker 1: keeping time by now. I mean, we've got a long
Speaker 1: history of keeping time, centuries of keeping time, and uh,
Speaker 1: and it's true. We have gotten very good at keeping
Speaker 1: local time, particularly things like, oh, I don't know, making
Speaker 1: sure that we are seconds match up every single second
Speaker 1: of the day, like, for instance, the quantum clock, which
Speaker 1: is keeping time so accurately that it won't lose a
Speaker 1: second for three point seven billion years, as opposed to
Speaker 1: the old standard, which is one second every hundred million years,
Speaker 1: which is just you know, acceptable. We can't live like that, right,
Speaker 1: But but so so from a local perspective, we are
Speaker 1: very good at keeping time. But that local perspective is
Speaker 1: all based on the fact that we're all pretty much
Speaker 1: stuck here on this big old rock we call the Earth,
Speaker 1: traveling around the Sun together, more or less moving at
Speaker 1: the same speed, although depending upon where you want are
Speaker 1: on Earth, that actually changes just a little bit. But
Speaker 1: it turns out that time is not something that's universally standard, right, Joe,
Speaker 1: what I didn't know this was news to you. You
Speaker 1: wrote a whole episode of forward thinking about time. You
Speaker 1: don't remember that, No, maybe it was in the future. Anyway,
Speaker 1: time is not standing a second, all right. So you're
Speaker 1: telling me, you're telling me what that that time is
Speaker 1: not a real thing. What about all of the physical
Speaker 1: laws we think of that are based on time, Like
Speaker 1: light takes this long to cross this amount of distance,
Speaker 1: all right? So time is time is relative, Joe. Time
Speaker 1: is relative depending upon a few things like gravity or mass,
Speaker 1: or the speed at which at which you travel and
Speaker 1: uh for us, for human beings, time is a very
Speaker 1: subjective experience where we experience time the way most of
Speaker 1: us are familiar. You know, a second takes a second,
Speaker 1: a minute, It is sixty seconds, an hour or sixty minutes,
Speaker 1: unless you're sitting in a doctor's office, or you know,
Speaker 1: attending a really boring lecture, in which case a second
Speaker 1: is much longer than or you're having fun, in which
Speaker 1: case a second is much smaller than. That kind of
Speaker 1: goes back to the subjective part. But well, I mean
Speaker 1: we we don't even know how long a second takes
Speaker 1: for somebody else, right, I mean, I know what a
Speaker 1: second feels like to me. What if your second feels
Speaker 1: a lot longer than mine does? Okay? Yeah, and what
Speaker 1: if the color blue looks different to you than us
Speaker 1: to me. That's beside the point here, Joe. What I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get at is that depending upon how fast you, Joe,
Speaker 1: are traveling, time will pass at a different rate for
Speaker 1: you than it would for someone who is not traveling
Speaker 1: at that same speed. This gets really complicated because we're
Speaker 1: technically all traveling already. We're on a planet that is moving.
Speaker 1: That planet is not stationary. Now, if we had gone
Speaker 1: back to pre Copernican times, where we all had just
Speaker 1: assumed the Earth is a fixed location that is static
Speaker 1: and is not moving, and if that were in fact true,
Speaker 1: time would be a pretty simple thing for us to
Speaker 1: keep track of. But it's not true. We are on
Speaker 1: a planet that's moving around, and that is part of
Speaker 1: what determines how time passes for us. Now, if you, Joe,
Speaker 1: we're to get into say, I don't know, a spaceship
Speaker 1: that has a really fast propulsion system on it, like
Speaker 1: close to the speed of light, and you were to
Speaker 1: just do a quick joy ride around the Solar System
Speaker 1: and come back. For arguments sake, we'll say that you
Speaker 1: you spent one hour according to your experience, your your
Speaker 1: watch says one hour has passed, and you land back
Speaker 1: on Earth. Now, you were to compare your watch with
Speaker 1: my watch, which we had synchronized before you've gotten that
Speaker 1: space ship, you would see that more time had passed
Speaker 1: on my watch than on your watch. That's true, isn't it. Yeah? So, uh,
Speaker 1: I actually did a little research on this, Joe, you
Speaker 1: were pulling my legs. I'm I'm not that well, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty misinformed. But so I I say, what if
Speaker 1: what if you start watching a movie when you get
Speaker 1: on your spaceship, and then somebody back on Earth starts
Speaker 1: watching a movie at the same time, how much time
Speaker 1: do you have to finish a movie. If say you're
Speaker 1: going at nine percent of the speed of light, and
Speaker 1: I looked up the Lorenz transformation ratio on this and
Speaker 1: it says, if you're going about nine of the speed
Speaker 1: of light, the transformation is effect is at a ratio
Speaker 1: of I think like it was two point two nine.
Speaker 1: And that works out that the per some on the
Speaker 1: ship who leaves in time to watch a movie comes
Speaker 1: back when it's over, has time to watch The Little
Speaker 1: Mermaid back on Earth. At the same time that the
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid viewer arrives home, you have just finished watching
Speaker 1: The Godfather Part two, two hundred minutes long, the full
Speaker 1: thing that you know, the sadness at the end. So
Speaker 1: you get you get some pacino in de Niro while
Speaker 1: the other person's singing part of your world. Right. So
Speaker 1: so the person on the space ship, it feels like
Speaker 1: only ninety minutes have passed. The person on Earth. It's
Speaker 1: much longer, or minutes only have passed for the person
Speaker 1: on this that's true. That's true. It doesn't it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like it, but it is. Yeah, because that's the
Speaker 1: way time we're subjective. It's a subjective experience. That's the
Speaker 1: thing subjective in the sense that it feels normal for
Speaker 1: everybody right right you on the spaceship. It doesn't feel
Speaker 1: to you like your time is going any slower. Everything
Speaker 1: seems totally normal. Your watch, the second hand takes a
Speaker 1: second to tick. The movie looks like it's playing at
Speaker 1: a regular speed. But if somehow the people on the
Speaker 1: Earth were able to peer in the window of your spaceship,
Speaker 1: obviously they wouldn't be able to, but if we could
Speaker 1: just imagine that it would seem to them like you
Speaker 1: were watching the movie in slow motion, right, and that
Speaker 1: that everything was going in slow motion, not just you
Speaker 1: watching the movie, but you're watch the second hand would
Speaker 1: be ticking away at a slower rate than it should
Speaker 1: from that other observer. This is also tricky because we
Speaker 1: often talk about from a stationary observer. Well, we don't
Speaker 1: really have any stationary observers because we're on a planet.
Speaker 1: It's a giant spaceship, essentially, isn't Isn't it even like
Speaker 1: just just theoretically a rule that there's no such thing
Speaker 1: as a stationary observer's I think you can only sort
Speaker 1: you can sort of posit one, but there's no way
Speaker 1: of actually confirming. Maybe you are stationary, you're technically in
Speaker 1: a universe that's expanding. So I mean, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a complicated thing, right because if you're if you are
Speaker 1: part of whatever system you are in, then you are
Speaker 1: moving right so that this gets really this gets to
Speaker 1: be a mind bender and you might think, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is kind of crazy. We're talking about near speed
Speaker 1: of light travel. We have to contend with this. Right now,
Speaker 1: there are satellites in orbit there in geosynchronous orbit over
Speaker 1: the Earth that are keeping track things like like your
Speaker 1: GPS stuff, which isn't necessarily geosynchronous orbit, but you've got
Speaker 1: satellites up there that that are sending down information and
Speaker 1: our GPS systems, which I'm sorry I just said GPS system.
Speaker 1: I'll have to go to the A T M machine
Speaker 1: and use my pin number. Um. But but let's say
Speaker 1: you've got a GPS and it's getting information. It's technically
Speaker 1: getting information from multiple satellites, and that information includes when
Speaker 1: the satellite sent down a packet of information and by
Speaker 1: using this this data, the GPS can determine where you
Speaker 1: are on the surface of the Earth. It triangulates all
Speaker 1: that data and it's all in the one of the
Speaker 1: important things in that is when was the data sent
Speaker 1: by the satellite supertime sensitive? Right exactly, because that's what
Speaker 1: determines where you you know, how it how it figures
Speaker 1: out where you are on the surface of the Earth.
Speaker 1: Those those seconds matter, right. And the thing is, those
Speaker 1: satellites that are in orbit are tracking time to us,
Speaker 1: it seems like at a different rate because their clocks
Speaker 1: over the course of a good span of time start
Speaker 1: to lose time and due to the distance from the
Speaker 1: center of gravity of the Earth and due to the
Speaker 1: speed at which they're they're moving. Right. To be fair,
Speaker 1: that change is so tiny. It is like if if
Speaker 1: we were just to you know, be aboard this satellite
Speaker 1: or something, we wouldn't even notice it. It's we're talking
Speaker 1: about the tiny, tiny fractions of a second. Now it
Speaker 1: matters if you're doing really precise calculations, like I assumed
Speaker 1: the kind of the GPS on matter. But but those
Speaker 1: kinds of speeds, it doesn't become a really noticeable problem
Speaker 1: the same way it was when we talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: watching The Godfather, right that that's much more. It's it's
Speaker 1: like an instant realization. Whereas with the satellite it's an
Speaker 1: accute lative thing as well. It would take months before
Speaker 1: people would even start to notice something' hinky here. I
Speaker 1: know that we synchronize them and they're all tomic clocks.
Speaker 1: Why would why is this happening? But we have to
Speaker 1: contend with that that macro dilation reality too, don't we.
Speaker 1: I mean, if we're talking about the future and we're
Speaker 1: talking about expanding into space, I mean, assuming we really
Speaker 1: are going to explore the cosmos, right, which you know
Speaker 1: I'm going to, I don't know about the rest of humanity,
Speaker 1: so that everyone else better catch at Lawrence like sia,
Speaker 1: I just call our major Tom from I'm out right.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if we want to do that, I mean,
Speaker 1: for instance, if we want to try and find another
Speaker 1: planet to colonize, most of the most of the plants
Speaker 1: that would be even remotely possible for that are hundreds
Speaker 1: of light years away. I mean, I mean the nearest
Speaker 1: systems period are hundreds of light years away. But you know,
Speaker 1: talking sing of Kepler twenty two. You know, that was
Speaker 1: the one that the Kepler found and they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: this one looks pretty cool. Six light years away, Yeah,
Speaker 1: six hundred light years away. That that's light years. I mean, technically,
Speaker 1: according to relativity, you cannot travel at that speed, right,
Speaker 1: you can't go at light speed. The closest we could
Speaker 1: hope to do if we if we accept the universal
Speaker 1: speed limit of of light speed, is getting you know,
Speaker 1: close to light speed, like we were talking about earlier.
Speaker 1: It's possible. Maybe we could someday get a craft that
Speaker 1: goes the speed of light and then traveling to these
Speaker 1: places becomes a lot more feasible. Right, but you're still
Speaker 1: talking about the descendants of the people who got on
Speaker 1: board the ship. Are the ones who are there or
Speaker 1: some kind of cryogenic sort of we managed to find
Speaker 1: some way of turning off the aging gene, and so
Speaker 1: we're perpetually the same age as whenever we got that
Speaker 1: treatment done. I wish that they would hurry up with
Speaker 1: that because my time is running out. People. I've heard
Speaker 1: you're very old, Jonathan. That's what I hear, Lauren. I
Speaker 1: don't trust the cryogenic freezing, by the way, because every
Speaker 1: time you do that, mother wakes you up halfway there
Speaker 1: and there's some beacon you've got to go check out
Speaker 1: on some weird blasted rock in the middle of space.
Speaker 1: This this kind of brings me to mind of another
Speaker 1: science fiction, beloved science fiction franchise, and I'm talking specifically
Speaker 1: about Star Trek, where they've established the idea of the
Speaker 1: star date. Right. Yeah, star date is is essentially it's
Speaker 1: it's well, I guess they do it in quadrants in
Speaker 1: Star Trek, but they have an established time that everyone
Speaker 1: can magically work on. And that way, when you refer
Speaker 1: to a star date, everyone else that you encounter knows
Speaker 1: exactly when you're you know what time you're talking about,
Speaker 1: because they're all keeping that same star date. Something. I
Speaker 1: can only assume that they either have a computer on
Speaker 1: some planet, probably Earth, because Earth is clearly the center
Speaker 1: of the entire universe, or or something else that is
Speaker 1: keeping time and is so technologically advanced lee that it
Speaker 1: seems like magic to us transmitting that signal simultaneously to
Speaker 1: every clock in the rest of the universe. Or I
Speaker 1: don't know that the quantum logic has has advanced to
Speaker 1: a state that that the computers can handle the log room.
Speaker 1: Maybe they've they've got the they've got the entangled electrons,
Speaker 1: and the spin of the electron tells the onboard ship clock. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: ship time, because you would have to have ship time.
Speaker 1: Ship time would be what it would feel like to
Speaker 1: the people who are on board the ship, right, and
Speaker 1: that time would feel like just like on any other service,
Speaker 1: that the second is a second, a minutism, etcetera. The
Speaker 1: star date is supposed to be outside of that, it's
Speaker 1: supposed to be this universal time. And again I agree,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably something that's supposed to be said
Speaker 1: on Earth because starf Lead is that's where Earth is.
Speaker 1: And I can't believe we're having this discussion this in depth.
Speaker 1: But they didn't even keep it consistent on the show. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the early days, they just had a shorthand you know,
Speaker 1: back back before like the first if you watch that
Speaker 1: the original series and uh and you watch those first
Speaker 1: few episodes there, they aren't consistent. In fact, there are
Speaker 1: later episodes that have earlier star dates because they were
Speaker 1: just kind of they thought it sounded cool. They were
Speaker 1: just spitting out numbers. Yeah, they were like like number
Speaker 1: forty seven, etcetera. Yeah, yeah, that is a cool number.
Speaker 1: And in the Star Trek University seven is pretty big.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that's the thing is that you would have
Speaker 1: to have some sort of really complex computer to be
Speaker 1: able to take in that information and take your onboard
Speaker 1: ship's clock, and it was just ridiculous. Wait a second,
Speaker 1: let's break this down. Okay, let's talk about what's really
Speaker 1: the problem here. Okay, Now, in Star Trek, they're going
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light. So let's just maybe
Speaker 1: that's possible. You know, maybe everything we know is wrong.
Speaker 1: But let's let's just say right for right now that
Speaker 1: that that's not actually what we're gonna be doing. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're just we're ignore test or as entirely. Just skip
Speaker 1: over that. That's cool. Let's imagine that that we can
Speaker 1: go the speed of light. Okay, like we were talking
Speaker 1: about before, break it down. What what's the actual problem.
Speaker 1: Why can't we keep clocks synchronized? Well, because again time
Speaker 1: is from from a stationary observer, which again from the
Speaker 1: observer down here, time is is literally moving differently. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's all the theory of relativity by
Speaker 1: by Einstein. It says that that time is part of
Speaker 1: the fabric of space, and that the fabric of space
Speaker 1: time is is warped by both gravity and speed, and
Speaker 1: so so you're you're changing, you are intrinsically changing the
Speaker 1: nature of this imaginary thing. You're changing your experience. Well,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it sounds like essentially, what we're saying
Speaker 1: is that time is an experience. It's not something that
Speaker 1: you can track in any kind of standard or universal way.
Speaker 1: It's also a magazine. Yeah, I just didn't want you
Speaker 1: to pigeonhole. It's also a print side project. That's true, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Morris Day. Yeah, anyway, Yeah, that's Joe and I are
Speaker 1: bonding over terrible references. Uh, yeah, I mean it's it is.
Speaker 1: It's totally subjective and really the the to me, one
Speaker 1: of the interesting things is that, uh, from the perspective
Speaker 1: of any one individual, whether that person is aboard a
Speaker 1: spaceship or on a planet or drifting out into the dark,
Speaker 1: cold clutches of space itself, time is passing at a
Speaker 1: very at that normal rate, normal being like, this is
Speaker 1: this is what I'm used to. It's not until you
Speaker 1: meet up with someone else who has been traveling at
Speaker 1: a different speed and you compare notes that you even
Speaker 1: have the moment where you're like, wow, that's that's weird.
Speaker 1: So maybe we would just have to give up the
Speaker 1: fact that Okay, if you're traveling it is, you know,
Speaker 1: very significant fraction of the speed of light. Everything's gonna
Speaker 1: get messed up. Actually, no matter how fast you're traveling, right,
Speaker 1: it's going to get messed up a little bit. It's
Speaker 1: just a question of the faster you travel, the more
Speaker 1: messed up it gets. Right in a in an exponential way, yes, okay,
Speaker 1: so we understand that traveling in the spaceships at a
Speaker 1: near fraction the speed of light will will make keeping
Speaker 1: track of time across distances completely pointless. You just can't
Speaker 1: really do it. Maybe you could, I'd imagine have different
Speaker 1: sort of galactic time zones, right, like each planet keeps
Speaker 1: its own time. Solar System keeps its own time in
Speaker 1: a way that is useful locally, and when you get
Speaker 1: somewhere new you just have to adapt to their time.
Speaker 1: But that introduces another idea to me. So, if we're
Speaker 1: traveling beyond Earth, aren't we going to get messed up
Speaker 1: real bad? Just our bodies, our brains. I mean, we
Speaker 1: are so deeply programmed to work on this planet that
Speaker 1: has an essentially twenty four hour day in particular circadian Right,
Speaker 1: what happens to us when suddenly we just do not
Speaker 1: have day and night anymore. Well, if if you're a
Speaker 1: board a ship, I assume, I mean, we're talking about
Speaker 1: far enough in the future where we have these propulsion systems.
Speaker 1: It's it's far enough to say that I think we
Speaker 1: would be able to simulate not day cycles aboard the ship.
Speaker 1: So at least on on ship, your night day cycles
Speaker 1: to you would seem normal. They would seem to be
Speaker 1: transpiring at the same rate as they would if you
Speaker 1: were back on Earth. Now. Meanwhile, so when back on
Speaker 1: Earth would be uh, if they were able to see
Speaker 1: what your night day cycles would look like, they would say, wow,
Speaker 1: that's nothing like what it is on Earth, because again,
Speaker 1: you're traveling at near the speed of light. So it's
Speaker 1: you know, from the two different from the two different perspectives,
Speaker 1: it's gonna seem totally different, but from each individual it's
Speaker 1: going to seem perfectly normal. That would allow you to
Speaker 1: at least maintain some sense of balance from a normal
Speaker 1: day night cycle while you're on the ship on another
Speaker 1: planet totally different story, you're pretty much you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: unless you're living inside all the time with no windows
Speaker 1: out to the outside world, or you're on a planet
Speaker 1: that has a day night cycle. It's so near to
Speaker 1: Earth's that it doesn't really matter, which is possible, Like
Speaker 1: Mars is really close, yeah, like three something something ours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really it's it's not it's very similar. It's similar
Speaker 1: enough where I think it would be fairly easy to
Speaker 1: adapt to the day night cycle. Uh. Not a whole
Speaker 1: lot to see outside on Mars though, So I mean
Speaker 1: you'll be like, is it a nice day, Well, it's dusty.
Speaker 1: It's kind of kind of dusty. It's a little less
Speaker 1: rusty today than it was yesterday. It's not true, it's
Speaker 1: all oxidized. Yeah, So I mean that's just what does
Speaker 1: night even look like on Mars? I feel like all
Speaker 1: the pictures I've seen were taken during the day, and
Speaker 1: well that night it's pretty dark. They don't have any
Speaker 1: street lamps out there, all right, you know, you know, guys,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is incredibly interesting conversation. But as it
Speaker 1: turns out, I mean, it's it's going to be really hard,
Speaker 1: if not impossible, to manage time across both Earth and
Speaker 1: UH interstellar traveling UH spaceships that are moving at near
Speaker 1: the speed of light or really any significant speed significant
Speaker 1: enough to get out of our solar system and perhaps
Speaker 1: into another one, just because that's the way time works.
Speaker 1: And it's, uh, it's pretty hard to wrap your head around.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's weird to think that the second
Speaker 1: hand on my watch would be moving to me the
Speaker 1: same amount as it with on Earth if I were
Speaker 1: on a really fast ship, but from an outside observer
Speaker 1: who somehow is magically able to see this, it was
Speaker 1: like it's moving in slow motion. That's that seems crazy
Speaker 1: and counterintuitive to us, but that's the way time works.
Speaker 1: I actually don't wear a watch, so I don't even
Speaker 1: know why I bothered doing this show. Yeah, me neither
Speaker 1: are we are we three non latch wears. So, as
Speaker 1: the Great Douglas Adams once said, time is an illusion,
Speaker 1: lunchtime doubly so. And I think that pretty much sums
Speaker 1: it up. Guys, Uh, we hear it. Forward thinking. Are
Speaker 1: really excited to have a conversation with you, our audience,
Speaker 1: and to really make this an interactive experience, not just
Speaker 1: us gathering around and chatting into microphones and being silly,
Speaker 1: but to really have conversations about the future and things
Speaker 1: that are going to play a role in our future.
Speaker 1: So we highly recommends you go check out the website.
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