Time

So Google came up with a new feature today, that allows you to go back in time. http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

By the way, I am yet to believe this. I think this is an April Fool’s day hoax. But it just gives rise to a larger discussion about the sacredness of that one human invention that cannot go wrong – Time.

This is as close to a time-machine that you will ever get, a mass produced time-machine. You can send emails today to somebody wishing them for their birthday last month, and when the dear one accuses you of forgetting to wish them on their birthday, you can always claim innocent. In fact you can use the feature to blame the accuser of neglecting your emails and get a higher hand in the argument.
Already we have the facility of sending emails in the future. We can save an email in the drafts folder, and program to send it sometime in the later future.

With both these capabilities in place, today we can successfully claim to having achieved at least a semblance of Time Travel – the ability to travel back and forth in time similar to travelling back and forth between different points in space.

Here is more information on Time Travel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel

This is definitely an interesting feature as an experiment. But I do not support having this feature out in the public for everyone to misuse. In today’s virtual world, emails are considered sacred. It’s almost equivalent to written and signed off documents. Once you hit the send button, you are bound by your written word. Imagine a scenario like this: You are awaiting a response to an important query from one of the sponsors or vendors or the millions of other teams that you have to interface with in today’s collaborative world. The person who has to respond back is out playing golf or surfing or watching a movie or just in general being irresponsible. You reach a bottleneck and cannot proceed without the other team member’s input. Lots of money, time, energy and peace of mind is wasted in the meantime. Finally the person responds, but backdates his email response, so that it seems that he responded back in time. Now the gun is on your forehead, for having neglected the response.

This looks like one of those many features, which has an ample scope to be misused.

Even Gmail is limiting this feature to only 10 emails/year to any user. Their findings:
[(N x P) - /φ]/L = 10
N = Total emails sent
P = Probability that user believes the time stamp
φ = The Golden Ratio
L = Average life expectancy

I don’t know how the Gmail researchers came up with this formula, but my head tells me not at all. Not 10, not 1, not any. It’s a feature, which, if it falls into the wrong hands, can cause mass havoc. I like the comment left my one Mr. Michael L. on Gmail’s site: "This feature allows people to manipulate and mislead people with falsified time data. Time is a sacred truth that should never be tampered with."

On a more philosophical note, we are all aware of the direct, straightforward concept: time is motion. Time has a direction, and it is in that direction that it moves. This means that we live life according to a passing present moment. I am sure, ancient scholars, came up with the concept of time, and hours and days and months and years for some purpose. And by providing this feature of moving back and forth in time according to one’s free will, we are questioning the age old truth of the uniformity of time. That, there are 24 hours to each and every human being, regardless of your age, sex, nationality, race, educational background, etc. With this feature though, gmail users will have the additional facility of going back in time upto April 2004, at least 10 times a year. This means that gmail users have just added another (4*10) 40 years to their lives. So now think about this – Does time remain a uniform entity any more?

We need time. We need time to work, to eat, to sleep, and to accomplish all the daily chores of living. We also need time to know and understand our mates, our children, and our friends. Most of our relationships, daily tasks and other commitments, in fact, require more time than we have, and it is difficult to avoid the feeling that we could never have enough. Nor is our list of demands on our time complete. We have ignored the time we need to be alone, a necessary but invariably short- changed period.

With the increasing demand for more time, and the reducing supply of it, can the non-uniformity of time be counted as ethical anymore? Time was the last unfailing bastion of uniformity. Already monetary and physical sources of energy are no longer uniform. With time too falling prey to this, the future looks too bleak, from where we are standing today and looking at the past.