verything has a beginning and maybe so does time. Some argue that time is only an illusion to make it easier for us human beings to cope with life. Can you imagine a world without time? Without scheduled dates? How would that even work? Something must exist because everything, including our world, spins uninterrupted and has since its creation or maybe even before.

History of Time

Time was sort of discovered by ancient Greek astronomers who based timing on the movement of the Sun and Moon. About 30,000 years ago, the first people recorded the movement of these two planets in sequence to understand that a full cycle represents roughly 365 days and each day quantifies to 24 hours. But, was it always like this?

Scholars from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Sao Paulo have been looking at the way the Earth, Sun, and the Moon had evolved since the creation of the universe, or as it is more commonly known, from when the Big Bang occurred. It is difficult to analyze such data as there wasn’t anyone to record what was happening, but thanks to advanced technology, it is possible to have a rough look.

The experts speculated that, over time, the Moon moved away and the length of the day increased. When the planet and its satellite were 30,000 years old, the day lasted six hours; when they were 60 million years old, the day lasted 10 hours. These are only assumptions based on some calculations made by a very smart computer, but it’s really hard to imagine a six-hour day, that would mean everyone would have to go to work for at least a whole day and get paid for 6 hours.

A more accurate look on Time

Stephen Meyers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alberto Malinverno at Columbia University in New York calculate that over the past 1.4 billion years the moon has drifted about 44,000km from Earth to a distance of 384,400km. Based on this distance, they have calculated that during that prehistoric period, the day only lasted 18 hours and 41 minutes. I took 1.4 billion years for the day to be extended to our current 23 hours and 56 minutes.

This effect is due to the Milankovitch cycles which affect how much sun reaches the planet’s poles and are also the cause of climate change over a long period of time. These cycles allowed scientists to get the necessary data to make this discovery about the length of the day. From this, we can also acknowledge that the universe is always in function, which means that the day keeps getting longer, by .0000135 seconds per day to be more exact.

The insignificant fraction of a millisecond has always been the average rate at which the day got longer. It is more about the constant speed at which the Moon drifts from Earth which makes us think that this whole universe has a technical system that seems too well constructed to be natural. Based on this analysis, or day is yet to reach the exact length of 24 hours, but we still consider it as if it is because it makes life easier.

Those who have discovered time and the cycle of a 24-hour day, didn’t have either the knowledge or the technology to precisely measure how long the day actually was, and even if they did something tells me they would have still approximated those 4 minutes and made the day 24 hours.