Time, Asphalt, and the Cosmic Highway

Time, Asphalt, and the Cosmic Highway

History is fused by time – that thing they now say is an illusion.

As a kid in New Mexico, I’d look at the road outside my house and think: this black tar connects everything. One molecule touches the next, on and on. Step on it, and you’re linked to Fifth Avenue in New York, to the Grand Ole Opry lot, to all of Route 66. It’s all one big asphalt web.

Time works the same way, binding the history of our world, our universe. But instead of tar, it’s made of moments – moments that physicists claim are more smoke than substance. To us, time only moves forward. Yet mathematicians say it can go backwards too. I don’t get it, but I trust they know more than me.

If we buy into this illusion of time, we’re stuck in a giant fishbowl of cause and effect. Everything predetermined, like a toy top set spinning with only one possible outcome. Throw in some Chaos Theory and things get fuzzy, but aren’t those random bits just part of the plan we can’t see yet?

What does it all mean for our daily lives? For how we think and live? Maybe it’s pushing us to evolve, to see things differently. But that evolution loops us right back to where we started – trapped in time’s one-way flow.

We’re all connected – by roads, by time, by the weird physics of a universe we barely understand. Standing on the asphalt, feeling the rough tar under our feet, we’re part of something bigger than we can grasp. It’s a trip, man. A cosmic highway with no exit ramp in sight.