Time flies... and sometimes freezes

One of the biggest effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had in me has been an alteration of the perception of time and I know for a fact that I am not alone in that: when the lock-downs started in Italy and Spain in March and April there was a lot of debate of 2020 as "the year without a spring" because many people were commanded to stay at home when the weather was still really cold and by the time they were allow to roam freely on the streets again it was already the balmy May weather that welcomed them.

Then the second wave loomed and most long-distance trips had to be cancelled and we ended up spending a week in the mountains during the summer instead of visiting the family as it has been commonplace for many years. At that point 2020 effectively became "the year without a (true) summer vacation" because, even if the time was enjoyable in the mountains, we did not visit Karen's parents or mine, did not go to the beach and neither did we do many of the things that w regularly do in the summer.

Photo: Foto-Rabe from Pixabay

When the school year restarted there were a couple of months of relative normalcy before the third wave crashed on us wrecking all the run-up activities for Christmas, that had to take place away from the family again and even with very limited contact with our friends. It has not been a terrible situation but, as Adrian Wooldridge pointed out in the article I mentioned a few days ago, life under these circumstances suffers from a significant lack of texture, with the result and days blend into weeks and weeks into months without us realizing.

There is some solace in the fact that I am not alone in this feeling: since we are all humans, and not the Tralfamadorians from "Slautherhouse Five", we are all bound to the flow of time and even, if the clock seems to freeze in place whenever you are visiting with your mother-in-law, the fact is that the perceived duration can only vary up or down by a factor two or three, but we very rarely experience the feeling of a day going back in the blink of an eye.

Yesterday Karen and I watched another episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine which had me thinking about the perception of time: while doing some engineering research in a less trodden planet of the galaxy, one of the characters is arrested under the suspicion of espionage and expediently condemned to 20 years in prison. However, this society has developed the means to inject into the mind of the convict the precise amount of memories in a couple of hours, so that when he wakes up he has accumulated a lot of hardships in the virtual prison but the world has not changed around him. The plot revolves around the pains that the convict has suffered because he was in solitary confinement with the exception of a virtual person that has been his cell mate for most of his prison term. Of course, these two decades of grueling memories have, among other things, diluted his older memories: of his family, of his work, of his hobbies, and he has to claim them back slowly while, fortunately, the rest of the crew if very understanding and supportive.

The situation is very interestingly symmetrical to one that has been often described in relation to space travel: since stars are so far from one another traveling among them would require either relativistic speeds or deep hibernation methods so that the duration of the trip perceived by the travelers is significantly reduced. A beautiful example of the first case is presented in "Speaker for the Dead", a 1986 novel by Orson Scott Card, where Ender Wiggin, the main character has spent most of the last 3000 years traveling nearly at the speed of light with the effect that he has only aged by roughly 20 years, while all the people he used to know are long dead and their descendants are probably enough to populate a whole planet. For the second case I would like to mention "Passengers", a 2016 film featuring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, where the two main characters embark on a hibernation trip of 120 years alongside 5000 other colonists, but one of them is irreversibly awoken 30 years into the flight because of a malfunction. After a year of working alone to fix the problem, Pratt decides that he cannot stand the loneliness anymore and decides to wake Lawrence even if that condemns her not to reach their intended destination alive.

Both situations pose the same underlying question: will the explorers be ready to leave everything behind and embark on an adventure that will never see them back or, if so, to a completely different world from the one they left? Futuristic as the question might sound, the prospect is not that far out. One of the scenarios under consideration for the human exploration of Mars includes sending a first crew in a one-way trip to the red planet, where they will be able to communicate back to Earth but almost certainly they will be unable to develop in their lifetime the means to fly back.

But this kind of estrangement is not even a matter of the future: ever since Columbus's discovery of America there have been tens of millions of adventurers that have taken to sea in trips with little guarantees of arrival at the destination and even less hopes of bountiful exploits in the New World. Most of them never came back to their home towns in Europe or were even able to notify to their families that they had successfully settled in the prairies of Kentucky or the mountains of Colorado. And yet, people kept going in an indefatigable search for adventure and opportunity.

Hopefully we will not need to travel at relativistic speeds or hibernate for 120 years to shake off the SARS-CoV-2, but in the meantime we can entertain ourselves reading insightful books and watching compelling movies so that, at least for a few hours, time flies again. Enjoy your evening.