This won't be the last time.

It seems that my favorite topic so far has been to discuss time.  Time is so interesting and everyone has a certain view about time.  Therefore, my take on it is unique and I enjoy sharing my views.  Besides, I've got all the time in the world right now, and I might as well use it for something.  I certainly don't use it properly.  I waste more time than I care to admit.  But that's not what I'm here to discuss today.  I remember hearing about a phenomenon with time when I was in college.  I didn't think much of it at the time, as the only time I cared about at that time was Geologic time.  And those periods of time are so long, that it's hard to imagine the finitely small amounts of time that I'm going to be discussing right now, that it didn't really matter to me.  I'm not intimating that it matter to me now, but at least it interests me now.  The phenomenon that I heard about popped into my head when I started writing about time here.  So, I did a little digging, and found out some more info on it, that way I could competently expound upon the subject.

Whether you believe the story about
how Newton "discovered" gravity...

...he was the first one to describe the affect.
He did so in this book.  It's a fun read, you
should check it out. 

So what am I talking about.  I refer to the often overlooked and little know fact that time isn't constant.  I may have mentioned that before.  But I want to reiterate that fact. More specifically, I'm referring to the effect that gravity has on time.  Gravity, it turns out has a huge affect on time.  Well, huge if there's enough gravity.  To truly understand what I'm talking about, we have to understand gravity first.  We all know about Newton and the apple story, and his "discovery" of gravity.  I have a hard time calling it a discovery, since it's always been there.  I mean, people weren't flying off the Earth before Newton coined the term gravity.  He was just the first person to put a name to something that was always there.  Anyways, gravity is something that is inherent in all object.  Everything in the universe has gravity.  The sun, the moon, Earth, you me, this computer, the speck of dust floating by this computer, even protons, neutrons and electrons, some of the smallest known particles each have gravity.  The gravity that you, I, my computer and the atomic particles have is too small to make any difference.  But you put enough of it together, you get a force that we can feel.  That force pulls you towards the center of the object.  Not the surface, mind you, but the center.  That why when we dig a hole, we don't float back up to the surface of the Earth.  Now, how does gravity affect time?

Yup... he was smart.
I love this guy!

Time affects gravity in one specific and important way, the stronger the gravity, the slower time goes.  So let's think about this.  If you live at sea level, time goes slower for you than it would if you lived on top of Mount Everest.  We've known this since Einstein described the affect in his theory of relativity.  But those were just his theories.  Now we've proven it. Well, not me, the National Institute of Standards and Technology.  They used a pair of aluminum ion clocks to measure time so precisely, they were able to see the time dilation difference.   They found that if you moved one clock up a foot, the lower one goes 90 billionths of a second slower.  Just so you can see that, that would be 0.000000009 seconds slower.  So, if you lived at sea level instead of the top of Mt. Everest, which is 29,029 feet (plus about 2 inches every year) high, your life would go .00026 (26 ten thousandths of a second) seconds slower (you'd add that much time to your life).  And yes, that's over a 79 year lifespan, so you're really not gaining much here.  But facts are facts, so if you want to live longer, don't buy that penthouse suite with your millions.  Buy a bunker under the ground and live longer!  Oh, if the original article was too complex, here's where I first saw it. And NASA knows about this, they're pretty on the ball.  So they put this little blip up about time.  It's a fun little watch.

So what else does this apply to?  Well, for starters, if you lived on the moon, where gravity is 1/6th that of Earth's, your time would go faster.  Less gravity, faster time.  If you lived on Jupiter (not a great idea, by the way, the lack of a breathable atmosphere is troubling), you'd technically live a longer life because of the gravity is stronger, thus time goes slower (but again, you'd die instantly from any number of things that Jupiter throws out, including some serious radiation).  If you decided you wanted to go see a black hole (also not the best idea), time would slow to a crawl.  Now we're talking about some serious gravity (they're black because light can't escape their pull, and light is the fastest thing I know of).  And because of it, we're talking about some serious time slowage.  Now, I'm not mathematician and I'm certainly not an astrophysicist, but I know that the time you'd perceive as you approached the event horizon of the black hole would be slow enough that you might never actually realize you're entering the black hole.  In fact, it might go so slow, that time essentially stops and you never actually enter the black hole.  But that's just my musings and exaggerations of the idea, more than likely.

One other thing they were able to prove is what Einstein called the "twin paradox."  I've already talked about this before.  I just didn't know they gave such a cool name.  Basically, this paradox states that if you move faster, time goes slower.  So, if one twin is stationary and the other launches into space, when the astronaut twin comes back to Earth, he's younger than the stationary twin, ignoring the fact that time went faster for him because he was experiencing less gravity. Ok, let's take gravity out of the equation; if one twin is stationary on a completely flat plane and the other runs around for an hour, the one that ran around is younger than the stationary one.    So if you want to live longer, literally, live an active life and don't sit on the couch.