4:23 am and the clock goes tick-tick-tick Musings

Time, Speed, friction, and can it all keep up.

There’s this episode of original Star Trek called “Wink of an Eye” where normally invisible time-accelerated aliens take over the Enterprise and attempt to abduct the crew for use as breeding stock. Essentially they move really quickly and you only get to hear a mosquito like buzz.

So this has got me thinking. Madly.

There’s plenty of Science Fiction about stopping everything and carrying on about your shenanigans whilst everyone is frozen. Preposterous of course, because of course you’d have to stop everything, everywhere. That’s the whole of everything, everywhere, the infinite everything, everywhere. Mad, right?

Think about in a different way though. What if instead of stopping everything you just went faster than everything. I’ve chosen 1,000 times, it’ my game my rules, and a thousandth of a second sounds great.

So that’s 1,000 times faster than now. you’d move about 1,000 times as fast.

It lead me down two tracks. One was about ageing, well 1,000 hours is about 7 weeks. If you spent 1 hour accelerated that’s be the equal to 7 weeks ageing.

But what could you achieve in accelerated time? Which is where I started to come up with some stumbling blocks.

Could you, for instance, open a door, and if you could open the door, would it be engineered to open 1,000 times faster than normal?

Could you use a computer? Would the keyboard be engineered to work 1,000 times quicker than it does now? Would the OS keep up, would the screen refresh?

You couldn’t drive anywhere, this is about you being fast, unless you drove somewhere, went into super speed, and did your shenanigans in the wink of an eye.

I bet if you think about this you’ve only thought about two things, catching up with work, perhaps, or nefarious things. Super speed is useless for winning lotto, but might be useful at playing Roulette. Cash is perhaps less common than ye olde days, what with eftpos and the like now, but there’s opportunity to grab cash perhaps, in the wink of an eye.

But the biggest problem I can imagine is Friction. Would be be possible to mov 1,000 times faster than ‘normal’ I know it’s not the speed of light, but it’s pretty quick.

Would I, a human, be able to walk about without any adverse effect from friction from the air? At a brisk pace that could be 4,000 miles an hour right?