Time to pack it in

If it hadn't have been there would have been more events.Obviously.

If it hadn't have been there would have been more events.Obviously.

So there are a fixed number of events that can be packed into a given time span?

John - The deal here is that there is more people. Thus more potential events until the world has reached carrying compacity.

Ofcourse it has reached well over carrying capacity if everyone wants to live like an american or a brit. It would take 5 worlds to support that kind of living.

TTF

John wrote:


Impossible to know. Useless to think about. Seems to me you're thinking "equation style", reducing everything to fixed numbers. But if we were to add a number, as you suggest, who's to say that the effects will not remove others?

Also, to agree on what is one event, where the line is drawn between events, is impossible.

I can attend to that objection. My 'one event' is 'one hundred years'. I will reformulate the question:

Why can't the earth revolve around the sun 200 times in one hundred years? Is it because there is insufficient time?

No, it's because we've decided that that's the way it is. If we were to re-define one year to mean 24 roundtrips of the moon instead of 12 the earth would revolve around the sun 200 times in one hundred years.

I use the standard definition that one year is the time taken for the earth to travel once around the sun.
I can still fit in 200 earth orbits in the time taken for 100 earth orbits if the earth went faster. In fact, I could fit in 200 earth orbits in the time taken for 100 earth orbits without the earth going faster - because nothing shows the earth is going faster.

You run the grave risk of circular logic. A year is socially defined as the time it takes the earth to make one revolution around the sun; thus, the definition of 100 years is 100 revolutions of the earth around the sun. So we couldn't have more than 100 revolutions of the earth around the sun within a 100 year period.

But you are unclear about your definition of event--you initially use the word as a loose quantification for physical activity (i.e., the activity of matter/energy), then you define it as a period of time (100 years). Since 100 years is a measurement, it can't really be an event (it's a little like saying 3 inches is an event), we'll take the original usage of the word 'event'.

To answer your question we'd have to know the total potential for physical activity and the total actual physical activity for that time period. Since you've included the atomic level, shall we extend this mental exercise to the universe? Then we'd have to know the information mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph for the entire universe; but should we stop at this? It's entirely possible, even probable, that our universe is part of a multiverse system, thus we'd have to include any parallel universes sharing our 'time' dimension. The problem can really become quite unruly.

However, since you've included human activity as part of this problem, we can demonstrate that the potential for activity was not achieved if we can find one person who, during that 100 year period, spent any time sitting on his or her a$$ watching tv when he or she was physically capable of physical activity. Since I can attest to having sat upon my fat a$$ staring at the tv in a near vegetative state while being in possession of a set of perfectly serviceable legs on numerous occasions during the last century, we can conclude that the potential for activity was not reached during that period of time and, thus, there could have been greater total activity.

John, you sound like the kind of guy who could double the value of one dollar by tearing it in half.

There's a related discussion going on in this forum under "The Passage of Time."

Time is a brain construct. It doesn't exist outside of our chemistry. John Jones, your riddles are intriguing but from where we stand, the answers are unknowable. The flame trying to see the light.

He means that it is time to pack it in.