On A New Year And Time

As we roll into the year 12017 of the Holocene Era(Age?), I thought a little about some of the humbug thoughts such as "time is just a construct", "units of time are arbitrary", and in certain arguments those may have their merits, though the biggest question I can't answer is how to pick a certain day.  Here are some of my thoughts, mostly about "re-validating" the concept of time.  I hope this makes sense.

While "units" of time could be arbitrary, so could any construct of communication.  The goal is common understanding.  That's cool and good about it, but something else we use for time(roughly now) is how our star system operates.  Before we were using atomic vibrations and a strongly defined "second", days were rotations of the Earth, not 24 hours, months are an expression of the concept of using moons to track the passage of time, and years were markers of the seasonal cycles.  So cool, but what is time anyways?

This is a great reference to think about time - a short series of videos about Time and Entropy from MinutePhysics on YouTube.

So time is something we experience, even if defining that can be a difficult task, which is not my ultimate goal here.  I'd rather try to argue that it's almost just as important that it is so hard to define.  I cannot imagine what time feels like to a dog, or to a house fly, nor can I currently(or possibly ever) travel "backwards" through time.  The future is a mystery, and even the notion of what I call the present is delayed by my ability to experience it.  Despite all of this, humanity all seems to feel time and its pull through varied expressions, and we are able to talk about something so integral to our idea of existence yet difficult to define.

The New Year is a widely shared concept, somewhere between a solar cycle and 365 days(24 hours,etc).  Due to the fore mentioned utility of common understanding, the idea that the Year is 2017 is almost a shared human concept.  We've done a lot and came a long ways, and our ideas of time and its keeping predate our "Year 0", and while I understand how and why that came to be, I also feel as though we sell ourselves short. As something that we use to help coordinate efforts and lives around the globes, the numerical value of our current Year is important, because it is almost "universally" recognized.  What if the number we used was a closer representation of the time humans have spent coordinating, cooperating?

We've been working together in some fashion as a species for around 12000 years, which also makes for an easy calendar change to 12017, as proposed by the YouTube Channel Kurzgesagt.  While "time" may be something that is hard to define, it is also something that we share as humans in a "shared perception" of it.  I suppose in some ways this may be an argument of faith- that the New Year is a celebration in our belief of time as a shared construct, driving us forward on a road it paves itself.

Holy hay it's getting rather late and I'm tired, but I hope you all have a bright solar cycle ahead of you in the 12017th year of Humanity.
Trot On Everypony,
Alturiigo