Seven Days, Seven Billion Years, and Why Your Dog Is Wiser Than Your CFO

A Unified Field Theory of Fairly Everything

THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS · SCIENCE · ECONOMICS · THEOLOGY · CANINES

On time dilation, divine scheduling, the peacock's fatal beauty, antlers as capitalism's autobiography, dogs as spiritual advisors, the middle class as a buffering mechanism, and why Australia may have accidentally stumbled onto something.

By A Reasonable Person in an Unreasonable Time ~7 minute read

Time is not what you think it is. Einstein figured this out in 1905 while working as a patent clerk, which tells you something important about the relationship between bureaucratic employment and cosmological insight.

Here is what Einstein said, in terms your quarterly earnings call will never address: time moves slower near massive objects and faster at high velocities. A clock at sea level ticks at a different rate than a clock on a mountaintop. GPS satellites have to correct for this or your phone will tell you that you are six miles underwater, which would be inconvenient.

This is called time dilation. It is peer-reviewed. It is boring to dismiss and astonishing to accept. And it is, if you are the sort of person who holds these two things simultaneously in your head without your skull cracking, the most theologically interesting thing physics has ever produced.

I. God and the Question of Seven Days

The Book of Genesis states that the universe was created in six days, with a seventh day taken for rest, which is either the origin of the weekend or the most efficiently managed infrastructure project in the history of everything.

Skeptics enjoy pointing out that the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old, and that six days is not 13.8 billion years. This is correct arithmetic. It is also, according to the mathematics of time dilation, a somewhat provincial way to think about it.

13.8B

YEARS THE UNIVERSE HAS EXISTED — OR SIX VERY LONG DAYS, DEPENDING ON YOUR FRAME OF REFERENCE

The physicist Gerald Schroeder, a man who apparently found it insufficient to merely have a doctorate from MIT, spent considerable effort calculating that the six days of Genesis and the 13.8 billion years of cosmology are, from the perspective of the universe's own reference frame at the moment of its creation, the same duration. The universe was expanding. It was moving at extraordinary velocities. Time, near the moment of the Big Bang, was dilated to a degree that makes even the most aggressively optimistic project timeline look modest.

Six days from God's perspective. Thirteen billion years from ours. Both correct. Both true. So is God real? That is above the pay grade of physics. But Jesus — the historical figure, the man who lived in first-century Judea, who was documented by Roman historian Tacitus and Jewish scholar Josephus, who walked around and irritated the local government until it killed him — that person almost certainly existed. Scholars of antiquity, the secular ones included, largely agree. What you do with the resurrection is your own business and I will not press you on it here.

II. Dogs and the Temporal Mercy of the Universe

Your dog lives for roughly twelve years. You find this unbearable. You should find it slightly less unbearable when you consider that your dog does not experience those twelve years the way you experience twelve years.

Neuroscientists have found that smaller animals with faster metabolisms process sensory information more rapidly. They see the world in higher temporal resolution. A fly, famously, watches your newspaper coming toward it in what amounts to slow motion, which is why it is so difficult to kill and so philosophically unsettling. Your dog, operating at a faster biological clock, is packing more experiential moments per calendar year than you are.

A dog lives not fewer years than a man, but more moments. Time dilation, it turns out, is not only a cosmic courtesy — it is a biological one.

— A paraphrase of what the data implies, dressed in nicer clothes

Your dog has, in twelve years, experienced something qualitatively richer in sensory density than your seventy-year binge of meetings, notifications, and parking disputes. Whether this constitutes a better life is a philosophical question. Whether it reframes grief as something closer to gratitude is a personal one. I am not here to tell you how to feel. I am here to tell you what the physics suggests, and the physics suggests your dog knew something you didn't.

III. India, the Peacock, the Antler, and the Algorithm

India — population 1.4 billion, democracy, chaos, beauty, software engineers, and the Ganges — practices more than 27 religions simultaneously without, for the most part, the whole apparatus collapsing. Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Bahai, tribal animisms, regional folk traditions, and several belief systems that have not yet been assigned a Wikipedia category. They coexist. Imperfectly. Loudly. But they coexist.

The lesson is not that all religions are the same. The lesson is that human beings have been trying to address the same set of questions — Why are we here? What happens after? How do we treat each other? — through a remarkable variety of institutional frameworks, and that the diversity itself is evidence of something: namely, that the questions are real even when the answers are contested.

This brings us, with the inevitability of a quarterly earnings call, to the peacock.

The peacock's tail is a catastrophe. It is enormous. It makes the peacock slower, more visible to predators, and requires an extraordinary allocation of biological resources to maintain. From a purely survivalist standpoint, the peacock's tail is the worst idea in the history of vertebrate evolution. And yet.

27+

RELIGIONS PRACTICED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN INDIA — AND THE QUESTIONS THEY ADDRESS ARE ALL THE SAME

The peahen finds it irresistible. So the trait amplifies. Each generation produces slightly more extravagant tails because the peahens select for them, and the males with slightly more extravagant tails reproduce more, and so the system runs away from functionality and toward pure spectacle.

Biologists call this runaway sexual selection. Richard Dawkins has written about it at length and with some evident delight.

The Irish elk had antlers spanning twelve feet. Twelve feet. They were so large that the elk could barely navigate a forest. They probably contributed to its extinction.

The antlers were not for survival. They were for impressing other elk. The system selected for them anyway until the system collapsed.

Now look at a super-yacht. Now look at a private rocket. Now look at a social media algorithm designed to maximize engagement at any cost to human cognition. You are looking at antlers. You are looking at a peacock tail.

Runaway capitalism, like runaway sexual selection, is what happens when a feedback loop loses contact with ecological reality and begins optimizing for the metric rather than the underlying good.

IV. The Middle Class as Load-Bearing Wall

The middle class is the load-bearing wall of the economic house, and for approximately fifty years, beginning in the postwar period and ending somewhere around the time your company started calling workers "human capital," it was treated accordingly.

Then somebody discovered that if you removed the load-bearing wall very slowly, and put up a lot of decorative drywall in its place, you could extract considerable value from the process before the ceiling came down.

The middle class has been doing more work for less money in real terms since roughly 1979. This is not a political opinion. It is what the productivity graphs say when placed next to the wage graphs.

The graphs diverge like a bad relationship in the early eighties and have not reconciled. In the meantime, the gains from productivity accrued upward, in quantities that would make an Irish elk look modest.

The middle class, to extend the metaphor perhaps one bridge too far, is a temporal buffer — it absorbs the shocks between capital and poverty, provides the consumer base that keeps the whole machine running, and asks, fairly politely under the circumstances, for enough stability to pay a mortgage and put a dog in the yard.

It is not asking for the twelve-foot antlers. It is asking for a reasonable tail.

V. Australia, Legal Frameworks, and the Systemic Case for Regulated Sex Work

Australia, which has given the world the platypus, the didgeridoo, and an admirably pragmatic relationship with empirical evidence, has in several states legalized and regulated sex work. New South Wales decriminalized it in 1995.

This was not a moral endorsement. It was a public health decision, a labor rights decision, and an acknowledgment that criminalization had demonstrably failed to reduce sex work while succeeding brilliantly at making it more dangerous.

The research on decriminalization is fairly consistent. Worker safety improves. STI rates fall. Violence decreases. Coercion becomes prosecutable. New Zealand did the same in 2003. Amnesty International, not known as an organization of libertines, supports decriminalization on human rights grounds.

There is a version of the argument, which I will now offer without fully endorsing, that goes like this: extreme wealth accumulation is partly a symptom of social disconnection — and that societies with healthier, more regulated intimacy economies might produce fewer pathological wealth-accumulation spirals.

— A hypothesis that would not survive peer review but would make for an interesting dinner

The theory — speculative, unprovable, but not entirely without logic — is that some portion of runaway capitalism is driven by men who are substituting acquisition for connection.

The peacock logic again. Status display as a proxy for intimacy.

The twelve-foot antler as a substitute for a functional relationship with another person or, for that matter, with one's own inner life.

Whether legal, safe, and de-stigmatized options for intimacy would dampen the feedback loop is an empirical question that no one has yet found the funding to answer.

But the Australian data suggests, at minimum, that treating sex work as a public health and labor issue rather than a moral catastrophe produces better outcomes for actual human beings, which is the metric that tends to get lost in the antler competition.

VI. In Conclusion: The View from Outside Time

So here is what we know, laid out as flatly as I can manage:

Time is relative. From the right vantage point — the one that existed at the moment of creation, if such a moment existed — six days and fourteen billion years are the same sentence.

A being operating outside of time, or at the edge of it, would not experience the universe the way we do, any more than your dog experiences Tuesday the way your accountant does.

Your dog, who lives in higher temporal resolution, is cramming more genuine experience into fewer years than you are into more.

This is not a tragedy. This is a feature. Grieve them. But also learn from them. They are not optimizing. They are not accumulating. They are not growing twelve-foot antlers.

They are lying in a patch of sunlight and experiencing it completely, and then they are doing it again. India holds 27 religions and 1.4 billion people in the same container and the container, despite everything, holds. This suggests that the questions matter more than any single answer, and that the human impulse toward meaning is more durable than any institution we have built to contain it.

The peacock is beautiful and doomed. The Irish elk is extinct. Runaway systems — sexual, financial, algorithmic — share a common architecture: a feedback loop that has lost contact with the cost of its own optimization. They are wonderful right up until they aren't.

The middle class is a stabilizing force that advanced economies have been systematically destabilizing since approximately the time cocaine became fashionable in boardrooms. This seems unwise.

Australia has found that treating human beings as human beings, rather than as moral problems to be solved through criminalization, produces better outcomes. This lesson has broader applications.

And God, if God exists, created the universe at a moment when time itself was so compressed that six days and fourteen billion years were the same breath.

The math, astonishingly, works. What you do with that information is between you, your conscience, and whatever patch of sunlight you can find to lie in.

So it goes.

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Sources & Further Reading: Einstein, A. (1905). On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. Schroeder, G. (1997). The Science of God. Josephus, F. (~94 CE). Antiquities of the Jews. Tacitus (~116 CE). Annals. Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. New South Wales Summary Offences Act 1988 (amended 1995). New Zealand Prostitution Reform Act 2003. Economic Policy Institute Wage Stagnation Report (2019). Census of India, Religious Demographics (2011). American Veterinary Medical Association, dog lifespan data.