I am presently strapped to a metal cylinder hurtling through the air at a high enough speed that the ground is far below us. This is very fascinating by itself. But what is more remarkable, at least where I’m concerned, is that, owing to my direction of speed relative to the rotation of the earth, I’m going to arrive at my destination having spent less time traveling than I did on the plane.
Some back of the envelope math, and a bit of fiddling around with simulations suggests that it is (barely) within the technical specifications of the aircraft I’m on to fly fast enough to theoretically arrive before I left, but this would require ideal conditions.
So, everyone else would have to get off the plane and take their luggage with them, and the plane would have to be fueled up to maximum capacity to allow it to burn continuously at full throttle. Also, the ballistic trajectory which I calculate would be best for maximizing speed and minimizing air resistance would jeopardize cabin pressure, risk burnout in the engines, and break several laws and treaties. And the fuel usage would mean we’d be gliding in for landing, that is, assuming the aircraft didn’t break up reentering the troposphere. All things considered, it’d probably be simpler and safer just to find a faster plane.
I’m not technically time traveling. Well, technically technically I am, but only in the deeply unsatisfying way that I’m being pushed forward in time at a rate of about one second per second. This is slightly different from on the ground, because of my velocity and distance from the earth’s center of gravity. The difference isn’t really meaningful to humans, and any relative advantage I might gain from moving faster through space, and ever so marginally slower in time (or technically, altering my velocity through spacetime in a way that temporarily favors space over time… you know what, just go get a physics textbook) will be cancelled out by the marginal increased long term risk due to radiation exposure.
Any real time change is because of time zones. Time zones are in a weird place between being arbitrary, since they’re ultimately human drawn lines on a map, and having some higher relevance, since they do, to a degree, reflect the earth’s orbit. One isn’t really time traveling, though they are in a sense switching around the hours of the day.
But even though it all comes out even, it is still meaningful, at least in human terms. Not all hours in the day are equal, and one extra daylight hour might mean as much as two hours asleep. Where those hours fall in the day matters a great deal, as does how they are spent. Indeed, Einstein used this notion to help illustrate the concept of relative time in general, saying “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
In this instance, as I am flying west in the morning towards a destination I am excited about, the rearranging works in my favor, giving me an extra hour to adjust after landing, and perhaps more relevant to my case, making my late-to-bed, late-to-rise sleep schedule seem more normal in comparison.
There’s another quote along similar lines that I like, usually attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “There are decades when nothing happens. Then there are weeks when decades happen.” I’ve heard this quote thrown around a lot lately to describe the feeling of political and social upheaval, but I have always felt that it applied to me on a deeply personal level. Specifically, how it applies to my patterns of activity.
It is no secret that I tend towards being a homebody. This is not because I spend most of my time at home; this is misleading in two respects. Firstly, because I do in fact leave the house regularly, and secondly because with the modern internet, staying in the same physical vicinity is becoming increasingly common. Rather, I am a homebody because I am not a consistent participant in society, online or off. I do not go on social media, I do not go shopping, I do not discuss current events with my peers or participate in contemporaneity in any meaningful way.
Or at least, I do not do so consistently to be more than a cameo in most other people’s narrative. To explain in detail why this is true would mean repeating the points which I have already expounded upon at length. Suffice it to say that between my disabilities and my disposition, participation is far more difficult than it might appear.
This means that the few occasions when I can participate without hinderance are all the more valuable. An extra hour of time like this is worth a hundred hours sick in bed.
