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 ?

this article is quite experimental in its writing. i'm not sure i'm satisfied with how it ended (it feels kind of weird), but it's here anyway !

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: there could actually be "waves" of any kind of matter with a specific organization that would behave life-like or even human-like, couldn't there be ?

moreover, in wave physics, time is an essential concept. 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). this is why life and time are closely related in my opinion.

nevertheless, the reason why time is so hard to describe from a human point of view might be that time is the very thing that enables humans to describe it in the first place.

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-ish storage medium: dna.

data can be seen as energy organized in a specific manner on which time 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.

however, there are several other approaches to storing data. one that seems to be quite successful is duplication. if you want to keep your old family photos safe from time, making several copies of your hard drive is the best option. and human beings did not invent this at all: life has been using this technique for about 3.7B years. in each cell of any living being is a copy of their entire genome.

if one should remember one thing from this section, it would be that humans are really bad at storing data, life does it hundreds of times more efficiently, and it didn't need any engineering other than that of natural selection.

there are stories and games i like in which long time spans are described in a way that makes them feel immensely lengthy. i especially like:

• the manga "blame!" whose author is tsutomu nihei
• the lore in the game rainworld

unfortunately, i can't really write about these stories without spoiling a little bit, so beware of spoilers in the following sections...

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

in my opinion, tsutomu nihei, the author of blame!, is really good at depicting the immense nature of space and time in his story. there aren't 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 take 80 days to reach its destination. the characters don't really react to this information, as if it were a common duration for such a journey.

what is interesting is the use of large spatial dimensions to give an idea of the chronological dimension of the story. the sheer size of the megastructures in blame! is mind-blowing; it's almost impossible to imagine the time necessary to complete some of the buildings depicted in the manga.

to give an example, at some point in the story, the main character emerges from the city into an immensely large spherical cavity, so large that it's just impossible to see the other end of it, leaving only abyssal darkness for the eye to see. it turns out the main character meets some kind of creature that says it's been studying the space for a long time and that, according to its measurements, it is exactly 143,000 km in diameter. and what exactly is 143,000 km in diameter ? jupiter, the planet.

the game rainworld might look a bit plain at first sight. when starting a new game, you are given very few instructions on what you have to do and how.

first of all, you start exploring the map and discover it feels absolutely huge, even more so that the game provides a map that seems designed to be hard to fathom. traveling from one end of the map to the other takes a huge amount of time, especially if you're faced with unlucky encounters along the way.

then, there is the lore (spoilers ahead). throughout the game, there are a few scattered elements that reveal pieces of information about the environment's origin and the events that shaped it. it seems there once was an ancient species, whose members were conveniently called "ancients", which was very advanced in many fields.

however, these ancients were quite obsessed over some strange goal: ascension, ending their existences, breaking out of a cycle. they tried all they could to find a solution to that issue and actually found one way to ascend: diving in some strange fluid – called void fluid – found deep underground. yet the issue with this way of ascending is that it would sometimes cause individuals with strong attachment towards their life and the outside world to end up "stuck" in between life and death in the form of an "echo", never able to ascend again and stuck in an everlasting contemplative state, the exact opposite of what ancients seeked.

as they were dead scared of this eventuality, they built very large and sentient computers called iterators whose purpose is to find a way to ascend without the unpleasant effects. these are as large as mountains and condense so much water to cool down that they trigger insanely heavy rains closer to the surface; this is where the rain actually comes from in rainworld. iterators kept trying to find a solution to the issue for a long time, but eventually, yielding no results, ancients grew impatient and all ascended using the only available option.

the game's story takes place an unknown – most likely immensely huge – amount of time after these events. and iterators are still here trying to solve the problem they were given. this indirectly describes the immense timescales involved and pondering about them is quite mind-blowing.

i think what makes such stories so interesting is the fact that they let the reader take a glimpse of something that is quite out of the grasp of human comprehension. this leaves a feeling both terrifying and reassuring at the same time: some things are not meant to be understood and mastered, and it's actually all right not to.