So here's something that's been on my mind.
Imagine you're out hunting ducks. You're down in a boggy part of a lake, hunched down in a thicket of tall grass. You have to wait awhile. Timing is everything, and if you decide to take a shot too soon, this event will be over. However, you were patient, and you spot a flock of ducks flying in your line of sight. You ready your rifle, aim just in front of your target, judging its trajectory until you have your shot, and you pull the trigger.
There is a marriage between time and space, and we are inclined to measure them from our vantage point. If you are sitting in an airplane in mid-flight, and stand up to walk down the aisle, from your vantage point you are moving when you walk down the aisle, but in saying that, you fail to remember that you are also moving when you are sitting down. The same could be said if you were standing in one place on the ground and watching the airplane fly above your head. From your vantage point, the plane is moving and you are standing still, but you would be wrong again, because you are rotating along the Earth's axis, which is revolving around the sun, which is revolving around the center of the Milky Way, and it goes on, while the universe itself is expanding at speeds faster than the speed of light. It's not hard to be tricked; from our eyes, the world might as well be flat, and we're always in the center of everything we see.
The same trick of perception also works on time. We have a vantage point on time. From our vantage point, we are ALWAYS at the center of time. We are in the present, behind us is the past, in front of us is the future. If we think about how we measure time, it's really the same way that we measure space. We measure time in hours of the day, or where the earth is in spacial relation of the sun, in years, or where we are in relation to the sun. We measure time through distance, but still this vantage point is too small. It leads to cyclical reasoning. When we believed the earth to be flat, we believed that we were at a fixed point. The revolutionary scale of thought is limited too. You might believe that in a year, through the full rotation of the earth, that we would wind up in exactly the same place that we were one year previous. Then you remind yourself that our sun is revolving around a larger body, which is moving itself. Space and time, then, is never cyclical. We move in a line undefined by us.
So this is my real question: How would an advanced creature, who had the ability to easily travel all corners of the universe, see time on a grand scale? It certainly wouldn't be measure by our minutes, hours and years. That would be similar to measuring the circumference of the earth by walking heel-to-toe around the equator, but to a much, much grander scale. Even lightyears (which I think is interesting, because it is a method of measuring distance through a measurement of time) are diminutive in scale to the whole universe.
Now, let's go back to our duck hunting excursion. To hit the bird in flight, it would be less effective to aim at the bird where it is, because it's moving. You aim slightly in front of the bird, guessing its trajectory, attacking where it will be. I think we can use this to answer our question on the table dealing with time.
We gain direction through a grid. We can find a place from it's longitudinal and latitudinal points. Joe's Tavern is located at a point on Earth. If I wanted to meet up with some friends for a drink, I'd say something like "Let's meet at Joe's Tavern at 8:30 for drinks." 8:30 would mean nothing to our traveler, but they do have the advanced knowledge of how the cosmos moves and acts. So instead of meeting at Joe's Tavern at 8:30, perhaps he'd go to his cosmological grid, and say "Let's meet at Joe's Tavern when it is at this cosmological point in space." Time as a measurement of space, because even if our traveler was outside of the constraints of time, he would still meet his gang at the right time, because Joe's Tavern will only be in that spot in space for one moment. It will never return.
Perhaps we're still on a flat earth theory in relation to time.
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