Wow: 5 facts about the time that will give you a complete error

Time is a strange thing. Sometimes it lasts long, sometimes you have too little of it. Time is regularity. Your alarm goes off every morning. Every year you celebrate your birthday around the same time. Time is scarce. You want to get everything out of time before it's too late. In this highly remarkable ‘time’ (yes, see, there you go again) I found a few facts that will seriously blow your mind. Ready for a big mindfuck? Five errors about time. Here they come.

Error number 1: Good luck when you talk about ‘now’. Now doesn't actually exist.
Your brain is fast, but still slower than the ‘now’. 18 milliseconds later everything you perceive comes in. In some cases, everything comes in even later. A very scary example: when you are watching a sunset, the rays reach your eyes 8 minutes and 20 seconds later than they exist. This has to do with the speed of light, plus the time your eyes need to process it. When you see the sun completely setting, it has actually already disappeared for almost ten minutes. WAAAAAAT. NO. ERRRORRRR. 

Error 2: The time at your feet goes slower than that at your head.
Okay, wait. Let me explain. The closer you are to the earth, the slower time goes. Yes, I really just read that. I'm not talking about gigantic differences, but there is one difference. If you stand on top of Mount Everest, a year lasts 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level. Uh. Yes. Error. 

Error 3: There is only one clock on earth that runs correctly and your watch can never be exactly the same as it.
Yep. The strontium clock is the only real clock that shows the correct time. For the next 15 billion years at least. Setting your watch to this particular thing that is held together by strontium atoms and surrounded by lasers (yes, complicated) makes zero sense. After a while, your watch will be ahead again. This has to do with an increasingly slower rotating earth, which the strontium clock takes into account and our watch does not. Uh. Error. 

Error 4: You live on average 2.1 gigaseconds.
Nah, this is totally in the category of ‘you don't really want to know because it will stress you out’. Here, one second. Hoppa, another one. Tick-tock, another second. If you have 1000 seconds, you have a kilosecond (a.k.a. 16.7 minutes). A megasecond (a million seconds) gives you 11.6 days and a gigasecond (a billion seconds) lasts 32 years. On average, the life expectancy of a human is set at 2.1 gigaseconds. 

Error 5: We have only been eh, two minutes on earth. Actually. Or something.
Let me explain. Mother Earth is an ooooooold lady. But really. 13.8 billion years to be exact. If you tried to compress all those billions of years into one year, humanity? Two minutes... We make up only about 0.004 percent of the time here on our planet. Yes, we are exactly as insignificant as you feel right now. 

Source: timemanagement.nl