Mean Time

"I'm really looking forward to not having to get up early tomorrow morning!" said Lunchista fille over dinner last night. It's half-term week, so as well as no school, there's no football practice either. Suddenly an entire Saturday morning is open to us to do with as we see fit. Which is just as well, because "350" had decided to declare today a Day Of Action and our city's humble contribution to the worldwide array of stunts many and varied was to form a human chain, complete with Mexican Waves, around the Minster at the eminently civilised time of 11:30 in the morning.

We got there early and immediately bumped into our local eco-enthusiast par excellence (of course) who, knowing that Lunchista is something of a lapsed astrophysicist, mentioned a conversation he and his son had been having about how far it was possible to travel in a lifetime, assuming that you could, over a long enough distance, accelerate to about nine tenths the speed of light. Of course it would be a lot longer than an 80-light-year round trip given that, as your ship accelerates, the time would pass much more slowly for you on board than it would for your stay-at-home relatives, or indeed for any (stationary) aliens you might intend to visit.

The worst bit would be coming home to find everybody you care about passed away or aged beyond recognition. And, assuming Climate Change plays out as currently expected, in our case we'd find our city (presently only some 20 metres above sea-level) about 50 metres under the (all too real and not very Mexican) waves.

I wondered if the son in question had ever listened to the lyrics of '39 by Queen, written by fellow lapsed astrophysicist Brian May. And, walking round to find the event's organisers, I couldn't help wondering also if the Minster, which has been there for the best part of a millennium, would manage to stay around for a second one. At which point I bumped into the organiser of the Nature Reserve, who has been trying to assemble enough of us for a meeting to launch a new "outreach" programme. There are ten of us, and he's had to resort to putting all possible names, dates and times into a spreadsheet in the effort to solve the logistical conundrum involved in assembling us all. How little time everybody seems to have. Even the Year-Long Lunch Break is passing at a disturbingly rapid rate: now more than half gone.

Both mainstream and "skeptics" invoke Time repeatedly in their spiel: skeptics will say either that we still have plenty of it, or else that if you travel back through enough of it you'll see lots and lots of "Climate change" due to volcanoes, the sun, cosmic rays, you name it. And it never killed anyone, did it? On the other hand, listen to anyone serious talking about Climate Change for long enough (in my case about 2 minutes will do) and you rapidly develop a sense of "time running out".

All Lunchista can do is offer you an extra hour tomorrow morning before you have to get up. What can we do with this precious, and some would say illusory, extra time?