Have We Been Thinking About Time All Wrong?
A simple question raised by a 5,000 year old microorganism led me to wonder whether time is truly part of the universe, or part of the observer.
Recently, I came across a fascinating article. Scientists had successfully revived active yeast from microbial samples preserved on Ötzi the Iceman for over 5,000 years.
What captured my attention, however, wasn’t the yeast itself. It was those three words:
Five thousand years.
What exactly is five thousand years?
From a young age, we learn to understand the world through time. Five minutes, five hours, fifty years, five thousand years, five billion years. These numbers exist so naturally within our language that we rarely stop to ask whether we truly understand what they mean.
I suddenly found myself wondering what those five thousand years meant to that microorganism lying dormant in the ice. Did it truly experience the passage of five thousand years? Or was it, from its own perspective, simply a long sleep followed by an awakening?
In our daily lives, we have created a shared system for measuring time. We look at the same clocks to go to work, attend school, meet friends, and we use the same calendars to record history. Over time, we naturally come to believe that we all exist within the same timeline.
But I often wonder whether this is merely a convenient agreement that allows us to communicate and organise our lives. Objective time, as a shared method of measurement, appears to exist. But is it the same thing as the time we actually experience?
For someone who is waiting, a single minute can feel endless. For someone who is happy, an entire afternoon may disappear in what feels like an instant. We may live by the same clocks, yet we do not necessarily experience time in the same way.
This led me towards a more daring thought. What if time is not one of the universe’s most fundamental properties? What if it is simply one of the ways consciousness makes sense of change?
Perhaps what we call time is nothing more than a description of sequence — a way of distinguishing before from after. When change occurs, when memories form, and when observers begin comparing what came “before” and what came “after”, time unfolds alongside them.
If no consciousness existed at all, would “the past” and “the future” still have meaning? If the answer is no, then is time truly a property of the universe itself, or is it simply the way consciousness understands change?
And, taking the question one step further, if consciousness had never emerged in the first place, on what basis could we assume that the universe operates exactly as we understand it?
Many people would immediately object. What about dinosaur fossils? Geological layers? Radioactive decay? The cosmic microwave background radiation? Aren’t these all evidence that time has been flowing long before humanity appeared?
I do not deny the existence of these things. In fact, it is precisely because they are so real that they make me question time even more.
Through these traces, we reconstruct a history of the past. Dinosaurs once existed. The Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The universe began approximately 13.8 billion years ago. These conclusions are entirely reasonable and grounded in careful observation and calculation. Yet I cannot help wondering whether these historical traces are really demonstrating time itself, or merely showing us that certain states of reality once existed.
Have we too readily equated history with the passage of time? If time only acquires meaning through consciousness, then what exactly are those past events that none of us have personally experienced? Do they represent time itself, or are they part of an objective background against which consciousness later emerged?
I do not have an answer.
But if we have never truly settled the question of what time actually is, perhaps continuing to ask the question is not such a bad thing.
As I followed this line of thought further, another question emerged. We often say that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago.
But what does that figure actually mean?
Modern physics has already shown us that time is not absolute. Under different conditions, it flows at different rates. If that is true, on what grounds do we assume that our understanding of 13.8 billion years applies uniformly throughout the entire universe?
Could it be that, under conditions we cannot even imagine, what appears to us as 13.8 billion years of cosmic history may, from another perspective, have happened only a second ago? Have we unconsciously mistaken the human way of understanding time for the universe’s own scale?
If so, then what is time?
Is it a fundamental property of reality, or an experience arising from the observer? Does it exist within the universe itself, or within consciousness?
Ever since reading that article about Ötzi the Iceman, those words — five thousand years — have remained in my mind.
For us, five thousand years is enough time for civilisations to rise and fall, for kingdoms to be built and lost, and for the world itself to be transformed. Yet that dormant microorganism has made me question, once again, whether we truly understand what time is.
Or perhaps the version of time we have always assumed to be complete has never been the whole story.