On Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:53:45 -0600, Malrassic Park wrote:

To me, time is like a god belief, inverted.

Time started simply enough. The sun parading across the sky, the moon's
shifting shadow, herds going here then there, and the star dots changing.

Ways to see and predict change.

Then numbers. What was once seen as gradient flow and cycle became
hammered into imaginary finite linear segments. Time was imagined as and
classified into small individual units which added up to larger imagined
ones and then still larger... on and on. Time became number, and so as
number went so did time.

Time/numbers first 'conquered' and became space when they were applied to
navigation. The old ways of doing this did not work any more. When ships
left the sight of land, Earth/Water/Space was too big and uniform to
trust just distant stars and some flaky compass. A clock helped out.

Time/numbers then became a space reference or physical point on the
earth. Huge step forward in terms of human development as applied to
trade and, more importantly, exploration. Time/number became time/space.