Length Of Life, Perception And The Time Line

Time
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Scientists tend to think of aliens in the terms of what is found on earth, as far as life goes. I recently mentioned that time could be different for different types of life in the universe. Someone asked me how this could be? This led to a discussion about time. Time is perceived by us as traveling in a straight line, I am sure that everyone has heard this. We are born, we age and then we die, all the while traveling forward in time. While this could turn out to be true for all creatures, no matter where they come from, this traveling could be done in different ways and at different speeds and and some creatures may turn out to exist outside of time.

Old Man
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It is hard to believe, but there are a couple of forms of life that are thought to live forever, even on this planet. One is called the immortal jellyfish. It is said to be able to life forever, but that only applies if it is not eaten or killed in some other way. Leonard Hayflick found that only cells that are not limited, where they can no longer divide because of DNA damage, could be immortal, thus limiting almost all life on earth. Bacteria are thought to be immortal, but only if they live in a colony. Another creature that possesses immortality is the Hydra. Hydra do not age. To me the Turritopsis nutricula is the most interesting. It is a tiny jellyfish that becomes younger after sexual reproduction and can repeat this cycle indefinitely. What does all this prove? It proves to me that life from somewhere else could possibly be immortal also.

It seems that life using DNA is doomed, but is it? Could an advanced race have found a compound that stops DNA from wearing out? Even us lowly humans are studying ways of doing this. One proposal is a study to periodically repair age related damage in the human body. It would be sort of like when you take your car in for its maintenance, only this would be maintenance for yourself. All that damaged DNA would be repaired and perhaps even rejuvenated. It could be that aging will be looked at in a different way in the future, not as something natural, but as a disease. I am getting off the track here, sorry. I think you can see how aliens could be living longer than us, even if they never reach immortality.

Alien Spacecraft
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So far I have only discussed living in a time line that is like our own, but what if an alien time line was the same, but the speed at which they lived their lives was different? Where is it written that it should take all creatures the same amount of time to travel from point a to point b? I am asking this in the broader sense, I realize that a rabbit moves faster than a turtle and so on. Think of creatures that can live an entire lifetime in a second, or others that live for a billion years, or maybe forever. Would they move like us? Certainly not the ones that lived only a second, but were able to enjoy what they perceived as a lifetime. We would not even be aware of their existence. Perhaps we have aliens like this already on earth, or natural life that we are not aware of?

Life is in the perception of life. If you perceived that you lived a long life, but another being perceived that you only lived for a mere second, would it make any difference to you in your quality of life? Of course it wouldn't. Perhaps to some alien somewhere, we would be perceived to have lived only a second, or not even seen at all? There could also be beings that live for huge amounts of years and yet moved so slowly that it could not be perceived by us and yet they would think that they were living a normal life. They might not feel that it took them many of our years just to move a couple of feet or so. Both these races, the short living and the long living would feel quite normal in their worlds.

The race with the huge life span might have an advantage in space travel however. Think of it this way, they get into their ships, which can only travel at the speed of light, which is very slow in terms of space travel, but they can reach stars that are many light years away in only a few minutes of their time, even though these ships would take us years in our time to reach the nearest star system. The race that lived its life span in only one of our seconds probably could never have space travel, because it would take them longer than their lifetimes to reach the nearest object, even the moon.

The perception of time is handled by the brain. It is said that the neurotransmitter dopamine is what gives us our time perception. There are some people that have a lack of neurotransmitter in a certain brain area called the basal ganglia and they have a different perception of time than most of us do. To them things are happening much faster. This is illustrated by someone with this problem not being able to watch television. They claim that things on the screen are happening too fast and they can't keep up. There are drugs that slow time down, such as the illegal drug cocaine. Under stress time can even seem stand still if enough neurotransmitter is sent to the brain.

Will any of this be of any use to us in the future? If the life span of a human can be extended enough and time sped up, it might make it a lot easier to travel on long space missions. There are probably reasons for slowing down the perception of time also, perhaps in complicated repairs where time is needed to figure out the problem? It will be interesting to see what happens in the future with this type of research.