I’ve often wondered what would life be like without clocks/a measure for ‘time’:
I guess we would naturally wake up at sunrise, animal style. Sleep more in winter...
would we have jobs? Would we be more of a community based earth? Maybe we would all work together more if we weren't chasing the clock (then again that has more to do with 9-5 life - different story)
Would we move around as much and travel? Would we be as advanced as we are now if we simply didn’t put a measure on time?
It’s something I always ponder for sure:) I wonder if anyone else does or if you have any thoughts on this?
We would be much more backward than we are now without knowing the existence of time. Time is something invisible, but after all it is the invisible things that make the human move forward. Those humans who noticed and described time in the past, several millennia ago, were true geniuses, because they could notice the existence of something that we are not able to see, but that still makes us much better.
If today we don't notice the existence of time. How many people would be able to "discover" it? I think that very few, very probably none, would be a very difficult concept to understand.
The knowledge of time is one of those things that makes us separate from the animal world. It is very likely that no animal can know or understand time.
Animals are very aware of time. Geese need to travel thousands of miles to flee their breeding grounds before the snows, and return just when the thaw takes hold. When I hunted, the Elk would split the herds up just before the season began, and the bulls would hunker in the deepest thickets, where but few hunters had the fortitude to go.
Some herds actually flee the forests altogether, and wait out the season in suburban fields, where they cannot be hunted. They are much smarter than most of us think. Mature buck deer do much the same, although the blacktails here don't herd, but are dispersed throughout the range singly. During hunting season, mature bucks only come out at night to feed. This is why hunters must be in places to hunt by dawn, or just before dusk, to catch out the overeager and stragglers.
Many animals hibernate, and many more are quite sensitive to time of day. Our free brothers, the wild animals, have far greater sensitivity to what time it is than do we captive thralls, with our fire; light that pushes back the night that we can serve our overlords the longer.
Of course, I am sure that even plants can be aware of time in that way. But that is a very primitive way of understanding time. The human can be aware of a time from which he will not even live, or from which he never lived, the human has a truly complex understanding of time. If we had an animal understanding of time, we could not have made any progress that we have made as a society.
The Elk and Deer predict the season accurately without clocks or calendars. They do this because they know if they do not, they will die.
I do not see what makes our understanding of time more advanced.
Well, humans can predict, plan and manage complex organizations with a much more accurate forecast of time than an animal, being able to measure all kinds of unpredictable variability.
Humans can also understand more precisely, the effects of current and past causes, to foresee the future. It is said that the sun will go out within 4500 million years, whether true or not, the fact that the human can capture in his brain this figure, and the fact that he can find alternatives so that a future society can avoid this catastrophe, it tells us a lot about the superior understanding of time for the human. An animal could not even understand such a large amount of time.
Not to put a spam comment in here but this interaction; the string of comments, is what I like about this platform the most.
I didn’t think much about animals and time, yes they do hibernate, migrate and the like but the aspect of ‘time’ as we know it seems to be a human construct.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. I don't think it's a construction, but an idea, a much deeper way of understanding time.
Technological advancement would be stifled, as time is way to coordinate efforts ;) Forget plane travel even if we managed to invent planes in that disordered confusion, as the planes would take off whenever and you might be late or days early.