Space IS time. It's a headf**k but it's true. If you're a lightyear away from something, you are a year away from it in time.

When you look at the night sky, you see a spacetime mosaic. All of the photons (light) reaching your eye come from different time periods. If that star is 40ly away then the light you see took 40 years to arrive st your eye. The star right next to it is 400ly distant and those photons have been traveling 400 years. A representation of spacetime.

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And here I thought the earth was flat! :-) I really loved that dodge about talking about mass. 9.7 from the judge in NYC lol:-)

To give some more thoughts on the matter, much is often said about the probability of life in the universe, and the possibility of life's emergence in any given scenario. Leaving aside for a moment that developing probabilities with a sampling size of 1 is ludicrous at best, the method behind the conclusions--reverse engineering the requirements for life to evolve at least as we understand it to get some idea of what might likely be out there--can be flipped in the other direction.

We know, from our experiences, at least a little of what it takes to develop life. As far as we can tell, life on earth emerged from a single ancestor, which is to say we have one tree of life on earth that traces its roots back to a common ancestral microbial organism from which all life emerged, and all life shares family with. This original life form is an "emergence event" for life. Should life exist on Mars or Europa or even early Venus (which likely was a water world), it too would have had one emergence event similar to ours, and that life will have evolved along its own branching paths in its own tree of life. What then does it take to develop intelligence out of a microbial organism?

Because the discussion around the search for aliens usually implies the search for other intelligences, ones capable of using technology to communicate over vast distances, develop civilization, and explore the cosmos. Microbial remnants on Mars, aquatic animals on Europa, or whatever might have existed on Venus 500million years ago wouldn't be the holy grail first contact scenario we like to envision, though such discovery would completely change our understanding of life in the cosmos more generally; in one solar system, life will have had up to potentially four distinct emergence events, maybe more. The next question one might ask is, what happens if life emerged more than once on a single planet?

But our concern is with intelligence. Intelligence on earth had its own, distinct emergence event about 200,000 years ago with the emergence of homo sapiens. The thing is though, depending on how you define "intelligence", Earth may have had more than that. If you define intelligence as the capacity to make and utilize tools fashioned from the environment to better improve the odds of survival, than numerous species across the Earth already engage in that, from small maki monkeys using basic hammering implements, to Otters building dams, to other primates using weapons. Even homo erectus and other sub phenotypes of humans, distinct from Sapiens, used tools and built small communities; they now remain silent, but they existed nonetheless.

If you define intelligence as the capacity for language and communication along complex social structures or the ability solve complex problems, again, we see that all over the world, most notably in dolphins, who use a truly complex communication style to form sophisticated battle strategies in either hunting or playing, form social structures, and seem to hold very human like feelings for others--good or ill. And of course, primates have been able to learn sign language to communicate with humans. They even have senses of humor, and it's been argued they even have names.

If you define intelligence as self awareness--or sentience, the ability to recognize ones own feelings either physical or emotional as oneself--we see that everywhere. Dogs, parrots, primates, dolphins, elephants, and many more can look in a mirror and acknowledge that they are themselves, the foundation of consciousness, what one might call the soul.

And if you define intelligence as the capacity to develop civilization, and claim that humans are distinct in that category of all life on earth, than I would argue that civilization is merely the cooperative expression of beings that build with tools, communicate with language, and recognize oneself in the mirror as distinct from others in the group. In my view of the Earth, intelligence has had not one emergence event on Earth, but in fact dozens of emergence events, with humans being the obviously most advanced--but nonetheless only the greatest among many.

And at the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I can't even say with certainty that we were the first. We have no direct evidence of intelligence before us, but we also can't discount the possibility; intelligence's frequent reemergence in our tiny window of time would suggest that complex life naturally lends itself to complex, problem solving brains that lend further to the emergence of intelligence. What, then, may have existed 66million years ago, just before the fall of the dinosaurs, when the oxygen was richer and the life on it larger? What may have looked up at the stars and wondered to themselves--in their capacity to understand that they are themselves--what else might be out there, and what else might yet come?

In this view, while we can't say for certain how common life is, we can say with some degree of certainty that, where life does emerge, intelligence is not that far behind.

I think about it this way as a layman: You cannot move through space without an element of time. It is impossible to move from point a to point b without time elapsing. So space and time are inextricably intertwined.

Maybe oversimplified and please correct me if I'm wrong. But that's how my brain understands it.

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Time is relative. That's just your perspective, man.

From my perspective, I won't ever meet anyone born later than me that ends up older than I get before I die.

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Early on the easiest thing I thought about was 2 exact same clocks on 2 different planets. Planet A has 2x the gravity as Planet B. Time should run twice fast on Planet B. I realize this is probably oversimplified and I may have read it as an example.

Fantastic book called "About Time" by physicist Paul Davies is a great introduction to some of this.

Jokes should be ploughed through head on.

A great visual analogy that I once saw, was to place a light beam between two mirrors, perfectly balanced. Now start to move the mirrors. The beam of light has to travel further and further in order to reach the mirror above or below it. You can see that as the mirrors approach the speed of light the beam would seem to be suspended.

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That's fucking insane. How can anyone honestly believe that we're alone? Jeez

You can swap time and space. So if you go a long distance and your friend stays still, they will experience the time and you will experience the distance. That means, for them it will have been 100 years and no space, and for you it will have been 100 billion miles of space and 1 year.

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You’re going to want to read a book. If you ever want to understand this or anything else.

For this, maybe two books and a lot of math.

Great question, but no. The effect of our movement is absolutely not able to be perceived, even over a lifetime. That is how minuscule it is.

BUT theoretically speaking, if we could get someone moving fast enough or close enough to a massive object for enough time, they would absolutely outlive their peers.

Having said that, moving more is great for your overall health and well-being, even if it's just a daily walk around the park.

Is this why people who move more live longer?

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Consider that to pass or travel through space, it takes you time. Space and time are intertwined in that way. The only way around that would require manipulating space-time, which is everything around us.

We are all objects existing in spacetime. Objects with mass interact with space time, and these interactions are observed as gravity. More mass = more interaction with space time = more observed gravitational force

In the theory of relativity, spacetime is a mathematical concept that combines space and time into a single framework for understanding the physical universe. According to this theory, the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time are not separate and distinct, but are instead closely intertwined and cannot be understood independently of one another. In other words, spacetime is a four-dimensional structure that describes the way that objects move and interact in the universe. One way to think about spacetime is to imagine it as a fabric that is stretched out in all directions. The positions and movements of objects in the universe can be thought of as points or lines on this fabric. The fabric itself is not made up of matter, but rather it is a framework that provides the structure for the matter and energy that exist within it.

Yeah its the GREATEST pbs series on youtube. You should absolutely go check it out!

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Seriously though let me give an ELI5 response. Space and time are so interconnected that we refer to them as Spacetime. What we've actually observed and tested is that the more you move through one, the less you move through another.

Let's imagine an extremely simplified "spacial dimension" where you can only move in one direction. Let's also imagine time as a spatial dimension as well, for simplicities sake.

Imagine that whenever you move "North" you are moving 100% through space and 0% through time. Now imagine you turn 90 degrees to the right and go East, you are moving 100% through time and 0% through space.

Whenever you want to move, you have to move some combination between "Space" and "Time". The faster you move (through space) the less you move through time. The closer you are to a heavy object the less you move through time as well (this is for a MUCH more complicated reason, but again related to "spacetime"), but whenever a massive object warps space, it also warps time.

We know this to be true, because our satellites orbiting the Earth must be INCREDIBLY accurate and precise. So much so that our programming has to account for the time dilation that occurs (us on Earth experiencing time differently than the Satellites in space do).

Essentially the two things are so connected, that we believe they are a single thing.

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Its a pretty dense topic but here are videos on spacetime, from spacetime!

How Does Gravity Warp the Flow of Time?

Does Time Cause Gravity?

When Time Breaks Down