there are so many things i want to write about when i think about time. it is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting philosophical subjects to reflect on.

• aren't living beings just some kind of "waves" that excel at persisting in time ?
• how to store data in a way it can stay intact on huge time scales ?
• why are stories involving long time spans so fascinating ?

what are living beings actually ? in my opinion, a conceptual and quite elegant way to describe them is to see them as a kind of wave — as in physics — of matter sustaining itself to avoid dispersing and disappearing.

there is actually a book i love, called la horde du contrevent, which was written by alain damasio, that involves things called "chrones", which materialize as bubbles of turbulent wind. their particularity is to be self-maintaining and sometimes able to persist for minutes, hours, and even more... and it seems some of them can develop goals of their own. near the end of the book — and it's a bit of a spoiler — it is revealed that one of the main characters is actually a chrone.

the whole thing made me wonder: whatever the matter involved, there could actually be waves of it that behave life-like or even human-like, couldn't there ?

yet, in wave physics, time is a essential. there can be stationary waves but they are a special case that can only happen when a wave is somehow bound to a certain volume (inside a microwave for example).

that is why i think time is so hard to describe from a human point of view: time is the thing that makes humans able to describe it.

the concern of storing data has always fascinated me. data is essential to humans and life in general. humans have developed paper and hard-drives; and life has the ultimate storage medium: dna.

data can be seen as energy organized in a specific manner on which times has little to no grasp. yet there is a force working against stored data: entropy.

in thermodynamics, entropy is some kind of measure of disorder. and there is a fundamental theorem in thermodynamics that says entropy can only increase with time, on the condition that the system at hand is isolated. if the universe is indeed an isolated system, this theorem states that, at some point, the universe will become a uniform soup of matter, without any single bubble of "order" in it.

to be more precise, entropy characterizes the number of micro-states a system can be in, increasing it means there are more possible micro-states which aligns with the idea of disorder.

therefore, passively stored data is doomed to be damaged and ultimately annihilated. this is why long-term data storage media are interesting; they encompass passive processes that make them as entropy-resistant as possible.

there are stories i like in which long time spans are described in a way that makes them feel immensely lengthy. some of those stories are:

• the manga "blame!" whose author is tsutomu nihei
• the lore in the game rainworld
• the manga "usuzumi no hate" haruo iwamune

blame! is an excellent example of "time-infused story". it is about an immense city constructed by machines of which humans lost control of. this city looks like it has been made to host humans but is mostly uninhabited because the human species was actually mostly wiped out by some disease.

in my opinion, tsutomu nihei is really good at depicting the immense nature of space and time in his story. there are not a lot of allusions to time, yet a few scattered hints show that the time spans involved are just unfathomable. for example, at some point in the manga, the main characters take an elevator that indicates it will takes 80 days to reach its destination. the characters don't really react to this information, as if it was a common duration for such a journey.

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