The place Gentle Doesn’t Neglect and Time Doesn’t Transfer On
“The previous will not be behind us. It’s simply travelling slower.”
Time, to us, looks like a river—all the time flowing ahead, by no means repeating itself. However the universe doesn’t see time that method. It sees it as gentle—rays from moments passed by, nonetheless travelling outward, nonetheless alive in movement.
And this implies one thing astonishing: the dinosaurs are nonetheless on the market.
Not in bone or museum glass. In gentle.
When the solar’s rays struck Earth 100 million years in the past, a few of that gentle bounced off a T. rex, shimmered throughout the jungle, and escaped into house. That beam of sunshine remains to be shifting—nonetheless carrying the picture of that dinosaur—throughout the cosmos.
If somebody, far sufficient away and with a telescope highly effective sufficient, caught that gentle, they wouldn’t see fossils. They’d see dinosaurs strolling, respiration, searching—alive, of their view, proper now.
The Universe Is a Time Machine
Look into the evening sky, and also you’re not seeing stars as they’re. You’re seeing them as they have been—thousands and thousands and even billions of years in the past. Their gentle took that lengthy to succeed in us.
That very same precept works in reverse. As Earth radiates gentle outward, it sends our historical past into the universe. Earth is a sort of broadcast tower. Each second—each dawn, storm, beginning, extinction—remains to be travelling by means of house, ready to be seen from a far-enough level.
So if an clever species lived 65 million light-years away, what would they see in the event that they aimed their telescope towards Earth?
Not people. Not cities.
They’d see the Cretaceous interval in full swing.
To them, dinosaurs haven’t gone extinct but. The asteroid hasn’t arrived. The world remains to be a thunderous jungle stuffed with roars and wingbeats.
Extinction Is Native. Gentle Is World.
Right here on Earth, we bury the previous. Fossils are our solely hint of what as soon as was. However in house, nothing disappears. It simply strikes on.
Gentle is reminiscence—pure, non-biological reminiscence. It doesn’t decay or get distorted by emotion. It travels. It carries fact. The previous, in gentle type, is everlasting.
So whereas dinosaurs are lengthy gone right here, the sunshine of their existence remains to be reaching farther corners of the universe. Their extinction is just our fact—not a common one.
And in the identical method, you—your smile, your breath, your presence proper now—remains to be on its method out. In hundreds of years, lengthy after you are gone, the sunshine of you’ll nonetheless be travelling.
You’re changing into a part of the universe’s reminiscence.
Somebody Else’s Previous Is Your Current
Proper now, Earth’s gentle from as we speak is heading towards another person’s future. And another person’s gentle—thousands and thousands of years outdated—is simply now arriving right here.
We dwell in a sort of cosmic time loop.
Time, from a distance, will not be a line—it’s a sphere of increasing historical past.
The whole lot that’s ever occurred remains to be occurring someplace. Not metaphorically. Bodily, as photons streaming by means of the cosmos.
If somebody may collect all the sunshine from Earth throughout time, they might watch our complete historical past unfold like a movie reel: from molten beginnings, to historic seas, to the rise of mammals and machines.
The Current Is a Lantern, Not a Line
Most of us see the current as one thing fleeting. A knife reducing the previous from the longer term. However in fact, the current is a lantern—casting gentle outward in each path.
Your life is being recorded—not in information, however in particles of sunshine. And as that gentle travels without end outward, you turn out to be a part of the seen historical past of the universe.
Somebody, someplace, may see your second—even one million years from now.
And proper now, we could possibly be the historical past another person is watching.
