Whose New Year Is It, Anyway?

by Madeleine Kando

Since my mother died, two days shy of her 104th birthday, I have thought a lot about the passing of time. 
But why do I think of time as ‘passing’? Is it like a train passing by as I stand on a platform? That’s not possible since I am on the train.

And why does the train only go in one direction? According to experts, the reason for the arrow of time is the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy). There was only one way my mother existed and putting her back together again would violate the second law of thermodynamics. That’s why she no longer exists as my mother.

Nobody really knows what time is, but it doesn’t prevent us from experiencing it. According to Aristotle, this is interlinked with our capacity to perceive change. If I were sitting in a dark room for a week without outside references, how would I know a week had passed? 

But what constitutes ‘change’?

Environmentalist Bill McKibben points out that our inability to respond to climate change is because we perceive change on a ‘human’ level, but cannot perceive change in the sphere of nature. We are ‘fatally confused’ about the nature of time. (Fatally Confused: Telling the Time in the Midst of Ecological Crises, by Michelle Bastian). Our notion of time is specific to our species, for better of for worse.

If you were a mayfly, you wouldn’t be celebrating New Year’s Eve. You wouldn’t even celebrate New Day’s Eve because mayflies in their adult form, don’t live more than one day. They spend two years as larvae immersed in water, but then their one-day clock starts ticking. They swarm to find a mate, fly around a bit, lay their eggs on the surface of ponds and then die, all in a 24 hour span of time. They don’t even have time to eat, which is just as well, since mayflies don’t have a mouth. Does that mean mayflies appreciate their time more than we do? After all, we live about 30,000 times longer!

A fruit fly could potentially celebrate New Week’s Eve, since they live for two weeks. They still have to spend their precious time laying eggs, eat as much rotten fruit as possible and hope they don’t get squashed before their number is up.

A housefly lives a generous two months, which is four times longer than a fruit fly and sixty times longer than a mayfly. It’s like a one year old mayfly meeting a senior citizen housefly.

Mammals are guaranteed a much longer life span than insects. And the bigger a mammal you are, the longer you live. Field mice live about a year or two. They could potentially celebrate New Year’s Eve and make a resolution to eat less cheese, but what’s the point of losing weight when you don’t live to see the benefits?

Elephants live up to 60 years, bowhead whales live 200 years and the Greenland shark can live up 400 years. They should celebrate New Century’s Eve, but remembering a resolution you made a hundred years ago might not be so easy.

One of the longest living beings on earth is the ‘Ming clam’. It can live up to 500 years. Can you imagine having 500 years to live? When a Ming clam is a mere 8 years old, we already spent most of our useful life, at age 48. At the height of the Ming clam’s puberty, we are all long dead and buried. And to vaunt its superiority, the lucky devil keeps on living for another 485 years! 

Who cares about time, when you have so much of it? You can cruise along, violate the minimum speed limit, with not a care in the world. Did you forget about your best friend’s birthday? No harm done, there will be so many more. A Ming clam lives 200,000 times longer than a mayfly. But do they appreciate all that extra time, or do they take it for granted? Unfortunately, the last surviving Ming clam was killed by scientists trying to work out how old he was.

 

Glass sponges (Hexactinellid sponges) have an even longer life. They grow in the deep ocean with an average life span of 20,000 years. They are made of silica, the same stuff that is used for fiber optic cables. They were already celebrating Happy New Millennium when much of the earth was covered with ice during the last glacial period.

 

If this discrepancy between life spans blows your mind, let me tell you about the ‘immortal jellyfish’, a.k.a. ‘Turritopsis dohrnii’. When a Turritopsis is injured or starving, it converts into a blob and it undergoes trans differentiation, which means that its cells change into other types of cells. This ability to reverse the biotic cycle allows the jellyfish to bypass death, rendering Turritopsis dohrnii potentially biologically immortal. It is literally the Benjamin Button of the oceans.

I like this jellyfish. It comes closest to my vision of my mother’s immortality. After all, her cells live on in me and they will live on in my children’s children, and so on. Maybe she is immortal, after all..

If you were a star, you would celebrate Happy Gigaannum. That’s another word for billion. Stars the size of our sun live about 10 billion years, but in the case of stars, the smaller you are, the longer you live. Red dwarfs live to 100 billion years, much longer than the current age of the universe.

So you see, in the grand scheme of things, we are like flies in the ointment called Nature. But celebrating New Year is something we do to reassure ourselves that the old year was not our last. Maybe it’s better to stick to our own myopic customs.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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