Written by Sonja Porter

According to the Daily Express, writing on 19th August, ‘Joe Biden has been criticised after he played down the desperate attempt of Afghans to flee by clinging on to planes, saying “that was four or five days ago”‘  The Afghan debacle seems to have happened so quickly that most people have been stunned not only at the fact that it has happened, but at the speed it took.  Five days ago, American troops were fighting in Afghanistan as they had been for the past 20 years, but now they scrambling to return home.
‘…Four or five days ago.’  Is that in fact a short time or a long one, as President Biden seems to think?
Who knows?
After all, how long is time and come to that, how big is space? Who keeps the measure, for we humans certainly don’t.
We measure time by how long it takes for our planet to orbit our sun. One orbit, one year. We say that the universe has existed for about 13.5 billion years since its creation and our Milky Way galaxy a little less. The sun was formed some 4.5 billion years ago and our planet a little later. A long existence or a short one? How do we tell? We judge the length of a human life as being, roughly, seventy turns of our sun; cats and dogs might live for ten turns and perhaps think them to be as long a life as ours. And how about that mayfly — it lives for just one of our days but if it could think, would it consider that it had lived a good, long life? And elements? Some survive for a minute fraction of a second — a long life or a short one? How do we know?
And how about space, do we have any true measure for distance?
If using the Imperial system, we humans measure distance by pacing out a mile. Our planet’s circumference at the equator is about 25,000 of our miles, which seems to us to be a fair distance. Our satellite the moon has a smaller circumference of 2,161 miles but is 238,855 miles from earth, while our star the Sun is all of 93 million miles from earth and the distance to the furthest planet in our star system, Neptune, is an average of 2.8 billion miles. Which we can just about imagine. But after that, the distances are so vast that we have to measure in light years. A light year is not time but the distance that light travels in a year and since light travels approximately 86,000 miles in one second, the distance it must travel in a year is 6 trillion miles which means that our nearest star is Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years or 25 trillion miles from the Sun…an unimaginable distance.
But if we go the other way, distances become unimaginably small.
To us, a mayfly is tiny, but can still be seen fluttering over water; a grain of sand is even smaller but can still be seen when held in the hand. But an atom can only be seen by using a very special tunnelling microscope. Atomism (from the Ancient Greek atmos’ meaning ‘uncuttable’) was theorised by several civilisations in the past, including Ancient Greece and India, which believed that the natural world consisted of two fundamental parts: indivisible atoms and empty void. And so it was believed until the last century when the atom was first split by the New Zealander, Ernest Rutherford. Now we could ‘see’ inside the atom, but not with our eyes, only with a special ‘tunnelling’ microscope: to visualize the minuteness of the atom, consider that a typical human hair is about 1 million carbon atoms in width. And now there are sub-atomic particles with wonderful names such as quarks, strange and charm, which are even smaller and even more impossible for us to see. So, how far ‘down’ is it possible to go, how tiny do things have to be before they cease to exist?
A 1957 film called The Incredible Shrinking Man ended with the realisation by the protagonist that no matter how much he shrank — from the size of a child, to the size of a spider, to the size of a bacterium — he would not die but simply go on getting smaller and smaller. If we could look inside an electron, should we see another universe which contained other electrons which, if split would show another universe and other electrons and so on to infinity?
But how about going the other way? We think the universe immense, but in truth, is it? How do we know? How do we really measure it? Suppose our universe is just a molecule in a greater universe and suppose that that universe is simply a molecule in an even greater universe…on and on, one outside another, an unending Russian Doll? One 1960s author pictured the universe as a raindrop on the cape of a celestial gendarme who would, any time now, shrug his shoulders…
Both space and time seem incalculable to us.
So, was President Biden right in intimating that something that happened four or five days ago was too long ago to bother about?  Or was he wrong?
But Someone, something, somewhere must keep the ultimate measure of time and distance. God? The Universe itself? Is God the Universe or is the Universe God?
Who knows?
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