“Time-dilation” is a concept which says that the closer you are to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you.
This is demonstrated in the movie Interstellar, where they show that a planet on the edge of a black hole is moving fast enough that one hour there is the equivalent of several years on Earth.
There are places like this all over the universe, where one planet is moving so fast that entire lifetimes could pass by on another planet, while only a few seconds had passed by there.
What’s really interesting about this is that it’s all happening side by side within the cosmos.
Think of it sort of like temperature variations within the ocean. There are some parts of our oceans that are freezing cold, while there are other areas that are relatively warm.
We have imaginary “barriers” to separate our oceans, calling one Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, etc, but in reality it’s all one body of water. Fish can pass through any of these oceans that they like because in reality there aren’t any barriers, and it’s really just one big ocean.
Within this ocean there are temperature variations, but it’s still the same body of water.
Now think about time differentiations within our universe in the same way. There are some areas of the universe that are moving “slow” because of time dilation, while other areas are moving fast. The key here though is that they’re both happening simultaneously in real time.
If you could step back and see the universe from a higher perspective, it would look much like our oceans with different temperature variations, except in this case we’re talking about time variations happening simultaneously within the same “body” of matter.
When talking about time-dilation, we’re using Earth time, and how WE perceive the speed of light, as the standard from which time slows down the more you increase your speed.
What’s interesting though is that even the Earth itself, as well as this entire galaxy, are moving through space at an incredibly high velocity. We use our time as the standard, but if you were to step out of our galaxy and look at Earth from a “stationary” viewpoint, it may very well look like we’re the ones being slowed down by time dilation because the Earth and the galaxy are moving at such a high speed.
So what if this means that all the billions upon billions of years of evolution on our planet, have actually been only a few fractions of a second from the vantage point of someone on the other side of “time-dilation”?
To take this even further, if you actually were to travel at the speed of light, would time stop? That’s the whole premise behind time-dilation, that you can’t go faster than the speed of light, so the universe makes “time” go slower for you in order to prevent you from breaking this barrier.
If that’s true, and if time actually does stop when you reach the speed of light, does that mean our entire existence, the billions upon billions of years that our universe has thought to have been here, could possibly be within a moment of time that is never actually moving forward?
We very well could be “trapped in time”, just as time-dilation causes certain areas of our universe to seemingly move “faster” or “slower” than others.
What this actually means is that time is only an illusion. It doesn’t actually exist, and it’s only our PERSPECTIVE that makes it seem like time moves faster or slower, when in reality those “fast” and “slow” areas are happening right next to each other simultaneously in real time.
The present moment is the only thing that actually exists.
The entire universe, and everything that has ever existed, happened at the same time. It is only the illusion of time that makes one moment seem different than the next, when in reality they are all one in the same.
