WE ARE CREATURES OF LIGHT BOUND BY TIME AND TIME

Einstein’s theory of relativity shows us that time isn’t fixed — it’s relative to the observer. What feels like “now” for you might be something very different for someone else on a cosmic scale. The faster you move through space, or the closer you are to a massive object, the more time bends and stretches.

This isn’t just theory. In a famous experiment, two atomic clocks — perfectly synced — were separated. One stayed on Earth while the other took a ride on a jet around the globe. When they were reunited, the flying clock was ahead by a few milliseconds. It had literally leapt ever so slightly into the future.

At our human scale, these differences are microscopic. But stretched across the universe? The consequences are mind-bending.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you’ve got a telescope powerful enough to spy on an alien light-years away. If both you and the alien are perfectly still, you could say you’re sharing the same “now.” But the second you hop on a bicycle and pedal away from the alien, you’d no longer see its present. You’d be peering hundreds of years into its past.

Now flip it — pedal toward the alien instead. Suddenly, you’d be staring into its future by centuries. Let that sink in: just your small local motion, amplified across vast distances, changes what slice of reality you witness. And yes, the alien could do the exact same thing to us.

If past, present, and future can all be observed depending on motion and perspective… doesn’t that mean they all exist?

And if that’s not enough to scramble your brain, consider this: photons — the smallest packets of light — don’t experience time at all. The starlight you see tonight left its galaxy millions of years ago. But for the photon, the instant it was born in the heart of that star is the same instant it lands on your eye. To light itself, the journey took no time at all.

So here we are: beings ruled by something that may not even exist in the way we imagine. We experience time as a steady flow, moment to moment — but in truth, it bends, it stretches, and it vanishes depending on perspective.

We move in three dimensions — forward/backward, left/right, up/down. Add just one more — time — and you’d become a four-dimensional traveler, free to wander history and leap into the future the way we take a road trip to the beach.

If your mind hasn’t melted yet, let’s go one step further: what if time, like space, is not a straight line at all… but a circle?

Up next, how the universe does not create straight lines of any kind and that includes time.