It’s real busy around here; suddenly after years of relative inactivity, every hour’s now precious, dogged by a list of things that need doing. But in the cosmic scheme of things, where Nasa scientists steer probes into asteroids eleven million kilometers beyond Earth, it’s hard to take the “to-do” list too seriously.

Don’t sweat the petty …
Anon

Out in the cosmos, time rapidly scales up to light years, a hefty unit given light can trace the circumference of the Earth more than seven times a second. So it can be a hard to know what scale to apply to one’s own precious time.

The world seems to have new currencies, time and data, your time and your data. We let people waste the former and hoard the latter, and we let them in the hope of progressing to the point where we can perhaps start wasting and collecting from others. Capitalism has a lot to answer for.

The most popular Black Friday deal this year seems to be the ninja air fryer. But I’ve really not the time to sit down and learn how to use one. They tried that with microwaves, and must of us defaulted to pressing the 30s full power button just as many times as we see fit.

With light taking more than 4.2 light years to reach the Sun’s nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, the ground I might cover in 75 or so doesn’t really compare, and in a way that makes a ninja irrelevant. You might say that though they began here, there’s not really enough time on Earth to be bothered with them.

Time is one of those finite resources that can both focus and befuddle: “I’ve just got too much time”, isn’t often heard. No, we’re increasingly time poor when compared to so many generations that knew regular hardship and deprivation we should have plenty to spare.

Stonehenge is thought to be around 5000 year old and was built with muscle and tools of stone, wood and sinew. Imagine moving a 3 ton block of granite 230 km across country with that kind of equipment. We might only guess how long it took – oh and there’re 43 of them. How differently those ancient builders must have felt the passage of time. Generations of communities laboring to build something to measure the journeys of the stars, so they could know the inflection points of the seasons, and so gauge time, or so we speculate.

So though time currently feels to be in short supply, it’s reassuring to think it won’t be for that much longer and that that’s of course entirely relative. What’s maybe more relevant is realising that these days we’re spending a very finite, resource producing data that is of little use to us but which is required to fuel the data economy. Perhaps time is better spent on something more tangible, though we’ve swapped sundials for smartphones the shadows remain.