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The concept "water" is the cause of lots of irrigation.
The concept of "plants" is the cause of lots of vegetation.
The concept of “cheese” is the cause of lots of constipation.
The concept of "loops" is the cause of lots of iteration.
The concept of "autonomy from China" is the cause of lots of Tibet.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
-Douglas Adams
'In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.'
If time stopped altogether, the neurons in your brain wouldn't fire and you wouldn't be able to think, or even notice it stopped.
Why does “stopping time” have to freeze everything else?
Time is what allows the next thing to happen.
Think of a row of falling dominos. If time stops, they stop falling. Literally everything else would be effected the same way. Even light itself would stop.
Maybe. Maybe not. What you describe, in my opinion, is little more than the common Hollywood/comic book trope of what happens when you “stop time”.
What if something else happened? What if we were still conscience, still grew old, died, etc, but the day/night cycle stopped?
Or, more fun than that: any calculation that uses t (time) ceased to work; like velocity. Imagine falling from the Empire State building and landing on the ground safely because you had no velocity?
See I think you have that flipped.
What I describe is that everything stops. By everything I mean everything. Electrons orbiting their nuclei would be frozen in place. As a result the time stop is completely booring. Literally nothing happens. Nobody can even tell time stopped. When it starts again nobody noticed it happened. While I'm typing this response time could have stopped completely, and restarted, dozens of times.
Even if your conciseness somehow continued, you couldn't see anything because light itself would stop traveling to your eyes.
What you're talking about is more like what you see in media. Where time doesn't literally stop. But someone, something, or someplace, gets frozen in time; But time keeps going outside of what's frozen. But yah that's not stopping time. That's freezing select things as time continues around them.
Imagine falling from the Empire State building and landing on the ground safely because you had no velocity?
If you had no velocity you'd just stop falling. You wouldn't reach the ground. You'd hover in whatever spot you were when velocity stopped.
That's assuming you maintained velocity you had with the Earth. Really if literally all your velocity absolutely stopped, you'd appear to instantly gain amazing velocity relative to the ground. Because the earth is moving incredibly fast itself. Traveling around the sun, that's traveling around the galaxy, that's traveling in the cosmos. The direction you move relative to the Earth would depend on exactly when it happened.
This is exactly what I wanted to see being discussed! I love it!!
The people in the traffic jam are being equally irritated by the concept of “space”.
Space jam
It sounds like what you’re pointing to is when humans became a more exact time-oriented culture. This was not the case until the invention of mechanical clocks in the 13th century, and town bells began synchronizing everyone. Then pay and efficiency rose, but people began to become more dependent on the concept of “kept time” and probably less “being in the moment” or being a more people- or event-oriented culture.
The podcast episode of Hidden Brain called “The Past is Never Dead” explains this pretty well and I hadnt really thought about what humans did before clocks.
Thanks for the tip! Sounds like a good listen. Added it to my list.
I agree that time is part of the equation, but the equation is actually larger:
- time + expectation to do something by X time + inability to make that happen + other variables
Fair enough. The "time" part adds pressure to the things we want to do.
Time kills us all by a thousand cuts, not clean but time is our vitality too, it pushes us into the world to leave a mark before it is too late.
To quote Big D from Hunter the Patenting
"I dont respect time, it is an odeious concept"
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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