The times sure have changed.
I mean. Things are so much different now than they were a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, a million years ago. One year ago.
If we go all the way back to a million, the United States, where it stands today, was pretty empty and cold. We’d have to travel all the way over to Asia and Africa to find homo erectus. They were standing up, as the name suggests, and they may have lived in functioning communities. But there were lots of other species around, some that were extremely large. Giganticithecus were these incredibly massive apes, standing about nine feet tall and 800 pounds. Imagine bumping into one of them. We homo sapiens showed up in Africa about 800,000 years later.
I only mention things changing over time, because, on this date, December 30, 1924, the great Astronomer Edwin Hubble made a formal announcement at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. He informed everyone that other galactic systems existed other than our own. Imagine, just one hundred years ago, we figured this out.
The details of this are amazing to me. The people who study space have to be very dedicated to looking at extremely large objects which appear much smaller in the mirror. Much smaller.
Anyway, that’s how time goes. It changes everything.
Today, for instance, we are one step shy of the government telling us we must wear masks in public. This is similar to how we must wear seatbelts when we drive our cars. We didn’t have to wear seatbelts when I was growing up. However, studies showed, science showed, that wearing a seatbelt would significantly increase one’s chance of surviving a car crash. So the government said we had to do it. The same thing could go for masks. It significantly increases our chance of survival when it comes to infectious diseases. There is no difference in my mind. We learn about improvements for our lives. Times change.
But the reverse of this was true a couple hundred years ago. Back then, back in the early 1800s, balls were quite the thing. Not bouncy-balls. But the put-on-your-bloomers-under-your-big-skirts-and-go-dancing kind of balls. It was a popular form of high societal entertainment, those grand balls, where everyone curtsied and bowed, and kept time. The big fad of masquerade balls took hold, and people wore decorative masks as a part of their outfits.
It was on this date, in 1809, that the city of Boston made it illegal to wear a mask in public. Other cities had done the same, saying the masquerade balls were becoming vehicles for “disguise, role-playing, and sexual freedom for women.” So yes. They banned the mask to rein in those breezy women.
Times, they do change.
A thousand years ago, things were certainly different. The Middle Ages. Things were much quieter then, as a rule. No airplanes, cars, trains, or motorized anything. Most places weren’t highly populated. People lived in small villages, dotted here and there.
The larger cities, like Paris, Cairo, Venice, were much different, with crowded streets and busy markets. Those places would have much higher populations, with political rankings, as well as the religious hand holding on to things. Kings and Queens, and dungeons and torture. There were a lot of big scary unknowns too — things that could be explained by ordinary science if only they had known. But a flash in the sky would be an omen from god. Or a sign of a poor harvest to come. Or the end of the world. Sail your boat too far, and you’d drop right off the edge of the earth.
With every tick of the tock, our world evolves. Molecules are shifting, electrons are being exchanged. Out in the dark night sky, we see the two million million galaxies beyond us. And time is changing it all. One dance step at a time.
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“Time is an illusion.”
― Albert Einstein
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“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”
― Bill Watterson
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“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
― Alan Wilson Watts
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The change from monster apes to ballroom nudity.
