Fragments Of Time

The first thing they said to my mother after I was born was that President Roosevelt had died. A historic event, like the death of a president, fixes my birth in time, but...
The new pictures from the James Webb telescope remind us that cosmic time is a bi-product of the speed of light. The telescope has shown us images of an ancient galaxy, apparently formed three hundred million years ago. The James Webb has only looked at it for a few hours, a tiny fragment of the time that galaxy may have existed. Those images have led us to fill in a gap of three hundred million years. Very clever guesswork no doubt, but...
Imagine the disappointment of a team of plucky space travellers setting out to go to this galaxy. Assuming they could travel faster than the speed of light, they might get halfway there, only to find that the whole galaxy had vaporised millions of years previously. A lot can happen in three hundred million years.
When we look at the sky at night, what we see is no more real than watching a Hollywood movie. We see images formed by mysterious processes some time ago, and we connect the dots and draw conclusions.
We see images whose interpretation and meaning depends entirely on man-made theories that have changed in many ways over recorded history. The Greeks thought those lights in the sky were something to do with the gods, but how were they to know — the telescope was centuries away from being invented.
To go back to my birth, for a moment, not that I can, but just imagine. Somewhere in deep space, way beyond Pluto, there is no evidence of my birth.
If, and we are talking science fiction here, if, you happened to be on Kappa Phoenicis, for example, which is a single star in the southern constellation of Phoenix, and you happened to be looking this way, and you had extraordinarily good eyesight, then, with luck, sometime in mid-April next year, you could see me being born.
If you watched for a few more days, you’d see me catch pneumonia. My grandmother was convinced I would die, and told my mother so on the second night. Looking back now, that sounds heartless, especially as I was her first grandchild. In some respects though, her cynicism is understandable. We are all prisoners of our times. When my grandmother had my mother, child mortality was a hundred and fifty in a thousand, when I was born it was half that. Throw in five years of war and Grandma’s pessimism can be understood, even if not forgiven.
Fortunately, my mother had more faith in my recuperative qualities. I recovered but the tough times didn’t end there. A week later, my dad was shot down over Denmark. Five weeks after that he escaped and made it home. In the middle of all that, Hitler died. It seems that in the time before I remember anything, my life was very eventful. If only I could get myself to Kappa Phoenicis by next April, I could see it all, seemingly as it happened, rather than hearing it second hand and connecting the dots.
There are fifty-nine star systems close enough for them to be able, theoretically, to know that I exist. Beyond that, no one has a clue, because my time, or more precisely, light that left earth when I was born, has not got to them yet. There are another two hundred billion trillion stars waiting to know about my birth. On those stars, and any associated planets, there are no dots to connect, no fragments of time to interpret. I don’t exist — yet. I don’t dwell on this because it can make one feel insignificant.
On some of those stars, the ones in the next concentric sphere beyond evidence of my birth, assuming they care a damn about such things, and have a suitable telescope, Roosevelt is still alive — along with Hitler, of course.
If we connect all the dots, all the knowledge that we have accumulated from the fragments of time that have been observed, we conclude that when we look out at the universe, we are in the centre of concentric spheres of time, but it’s more complicated than that, because every other celestial body has its own set of time spheres, and they all overlap and cut across each other.
If we met some traveller from a different zone, you can bet it would be hard to communicate, starting from their time telling them it’s Tuesday, when we know for sure it’s Saturday.
If I had a suitable space ship, and by that, I mean some device that could get me to a spot light-years away, then I could put myself on some elliptical orbit around the earth, cutting across those time spheres, so that I could watch myself be born, live and submit this story, twice each time around, and, I could not change a word of it.
I don’t know if you have ever had a spell of deja-vu, that phenomenon where you have a strong feeling that you have been somewhere, or done something before? It can be quite disturbing. If it happens, don’t let it bother you. Be excited by it. Think of it as like my imaginary space travel, only without the funny suit and some nerd from Houston telling you when to breathe.