Today we’re going to do some science!!! And have some fun sorta.. We’re going to talk about time perception and house flies. House flies you ask?? Yup, the common house fly. And why its life is just as important as yours is.
First we need to get clear about some science. We’ve talked about Einstein before. As a few of my wife’s colleagues have rather jokingly commented to me upon reading my blog and watching my videos, and I quote, “Steve you do a pretty good job of turning Einstein into a kindergarten teacher.” LOL.. So I’m going to do it again in an effort to teach you why every living thing matters!!
I had a moth on a video once. He flew across the video and I pointed him out to the viewers. I remember someone asked me why I didn’t kill the moth. I simply swatted it along to get it off video. Well, I only kill something, any living thing even a fly or a moth IF I have to. IF there’s a safety reason for it for example. Too many moths in your house and food can become dangerous as they lay eggs in it. They’re attracted to dust, so if you keep your home dust-free, you should be month-free. If not you can get moth repellent or cedar planks etc. Every living thing matters… Killing it, should be a last resort.
Let’s talk time!! To understand this article you must understand that every living creature lives its life under its own perception of time. Technically within its own gravity. This article is a mix of science and some Buddhist principles. First, the science… If you don’t care about these sorts of things I highly recommend you skip this article. I won’t be offended.. lol ha ha
Einstein teaches us that our perception of time is directly related to the speed of an object, the mass of an object, or the gravitational effect on an object, which is explained by what’s called gravitational time dilation which is predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Essentially everything lives in its own gravitational world so to speak. I’m paraphrasing a bit for simplicity.
For instance on the speed side of things if you were to travel at the speed of light for 4 days, to you it would feel like 4 days. But when you returned to Earth hundreds of years may have passed by. Time also changes the further away you get from the Earth according to Gravitational time dilation. So for example if you were on Mars let’s say, and you returned to Earth, more time would have passed here on Earth than you perceived passed while you were gone. Not a ton in this case, but enough to notice. The Earth’s gravitational effect on you became smaller as you moved away from it, so your perception of time changed.
In a nutshell because of our mass and relation to the Earth’s gravity we actually experience the universe in sort of a slow motion effect. We humans perceive life on Earth based on our relation to it. Our whole universe and solar system is whipping around much faster than we perceive it. It’s more like that graphic of an atom that opens the big bang theory tv show, or splits the show’s segments. With our mass, vibrational frequency, and relation to the Earth and its gravity we feel by our human perception that it takes the Earth 1 year to travel around the Sun. We measure this with a calendar. The truth is it goes around the sun at breakneck speed in its own frequency of energy. This is why if we travel at the speed of light (the cosmic speed limit) we in effect raise our vibration to that of the universe and move at its actual speed. Which is why 4 days of traveling at the speed of light lands you back on Earth hundreds of years later, yet to you only 4 days went by. If you suddenly move at the speed of the universe then the Earth whips around the sun a few more times than you might be used to while you’ve been gone for those 4 days.
How does all this science tie in with a house fly you might ask?? Well this is all a bit of fun but the same laws of physics apply to the fly. Humans are tiny compared to the universe or even the Earth itself. So to us the sun takes 365.2422 days to circle the sun by our human perception of time. We call it, a year.
Think about it this way, if we live to be 80 years old, to us that’s a long time. But to the Earth itself which is much more massive than us, 80 years is nothing. It’s like we never existed. 80 years to the Earth itself is a blink of an eye.
That’s all a simple way to put something very complex. To many it’s their life’s work. The physics crowd could turn my few paragraphs above into 500 pages without breaking a sweat. But this is SLT, and the concepts and theories I’ve simplified above are enough for me to make my point here in this article. It is important to note that gravitational time dilation has been verified many times through multiple experiments.
So with that point being made, let’s talk about flies and why it’s kinda cruel to kill one, so you should only do it if you have to. The genome of a fly is 25 times smaller than that of a human, however we share many genetic traits with them. This by itself is kind of just a cool fun fact. There are 17 million flies for every human on earth as another fun fact.
The average house fly in human perception of time lives about a month. 28 days to be exact. To us it’s just a month or so right?! It’s a stupid little fly right???!!
Well hold on a second!!!! Let’s do some math… A house fly is on average 500 times smaller than the average human. So that month for us is a lifetime to the fly as IT perceives time. Just like 80 years to us is a lifetime yet to the much larger Earth it’s a blink of an eye and not even worth noting. To us that month the fly lives isn’t worth much. It’s a blink of an eye really… Most humans figure it’ll be dead in a week or so anyone, might as well kill it…
I’ll do the “fly” math for you. That one tiny little month to us, to the fly is equivalent to about 41.6667 years in human time perception terms. Which is a long life in the wild for any creature to live by the way. Lions for example only live about 25 years in human time perception. Most birds like Crows for example only live about 7 to 12 years in the wild by human time perception.
So that fly by its own time perception has lived a full life. It lived about 42 years in human time perception terms. And if you think it doesn’t perceive that passage of time the same way that we would perceive 42 years YOU’RE WRONG!! It sure as fuck does. Every creature on Earth perceives time differently. It ties to gravitational time dilation. So your perception of time ties directly to the Earth’s gravitational effect on you. The smaller the creature, the less the gravitational effect, but everything exists within its own gravity, just like we humans exist in ours. Thus everything on Earth. flies, humans etc. perceives their life in about the same time perception terms.
In that time 42 human years by its own time perception the fly reproduced, learned, grew, it had a childhood, and it had an adulthood. Hell it had adventures even!! I mean seriously some fucking giant human the size of King Kong chased it around the house trying to kill it with a swatter. That’s a fucking adventure by any life-form’s standards!! That’s a hell of a day, and one to remember I’m sure!!
Think 42 years is no big deal?? In Victorian times 40 years or so was the average human lifespan. In fact it was 40 years for men and 42 years for women up until about the year 1900 when it jumped to 45 for men and 50 for women.
Those 41 to 42 years to the fly matter just as much to it as the 40 to 42 years mattered to anyone alive in Victorian times. The only reason we live longer now by the way is because of modern medicine, safety measures, and more nutrient knowledge. Otherwise as a creature we’re only supposed to live 40 years or so. So if the fly lived in the same gravity as a human (i.e. it was our size) it would live about 42 years on average. And just like humans some flies live even longer, and some shorter. That’s the nature of an “average” calculation.
The moral here, and maybe the lecture if I may is that the universe isn’t just for humans, or even about humans. While we certainly are special creatures, we are just that, a creature. Albeit an arrogant one that often thinks it deserves to destroy things and kill things. Yet I assure you we humans do not have the right to take a life, ANY LIFE unless it’s absolutely necessary for defense or for food of course. Any life taken without it being “for the greater good” knocks energy out of balance. We live by the same rules any creature does. Kill for defense or food only. It’s an unwritten law of nature in fact. And one that we violate often due to our over inflated egos which result in selfishness, and greed.
Someone asked me once if they would get the same bad karma if they kill an insect as they would if they killed a human. I get asked this a lot and my answer is always the same. Take it for what it’s worth but I can tell you the energy coming off a fly other than being a slightly lower frequency and maybe a little weaker is no different than the energy that fuels we humans. Life energy is always of the same energy type. So technically we’re no different than a fly in energy-speak/terms. And as I said in genome terms we share a lot of traits with them as well.
A fly is about 500 times smaller than a human, in both size and energy output, so in theory you would have to kill 500 of them to feel any real “karma” from it, and that return karma would depend upon the how and and the why of your mass fly killing spree. Although I will note, I know a few people who have no idea why they seem to have “bad luck”. I don’t tell them, I just shrug my shoulders, but you know me, I’m always paying attention, I’m always observant. And sure enough I noticed one day that for one of them they have fly strips hanging in their home with hundreds of flies and months suffering and starving to death stuck to them. I always wondered why I felt terror when I entered their home. My guess is the karma from that explains the lack of money for food they complain about for sure… Return karma is almost always related in some way to what you did to receive it. And keep in mind that energy always comes back 3-fold.
I know for a fact. These creatures, and all creatures in fact have feelings. Though they don’t perceive those feelings in the same way humans do, that doesn’t diminish them. Or at least it shouldn’t in the eyes and soul of anyone.
In the case of flies in particular they receive those feelings differently than us as I said. It’s more like a stimulation than an actual emotion. They can even put thoughts together and do simple calculations to maneuver or adapt to new surroundings. Ever try sneaking up on a fly?? Just because their eye is designed to see you coming doesn’t mean they don’t then have to make thought and emotional connections to react to get the hell out of the way. That’s a process, and a process of thought or emotion is the mark of any higher life form. Another mark of a creature with emotions, feelings, thoughts etc. is any creature that reacts to preserve its own life. And flies definitely do that.
So think twice the next time you swat a fly, or a moth or anything that you think isn’t a worthy life form to be in your oh so great human presence. Because I assure you that fly’s life means just as much to it, as your life means to you. And if you don’t think that it does, perhaps you should dig deep to figure out why. You can begin by asking yourself, why then does the fly try to get away when you try to swat it?? If it didn’t care about its life, it would just sit there. And if you think that’s just a hard-wired response, you’re right, but that hard-wired response is technically emotion. And just because a fly feels emotion differently to how you or I do doesn’t make it any less important than how you or I feel it.
As a point of note… Interestingly this whole fly thing is one of the reasons many scientist are very afraid of us being “found” by a superior alien race. Most scientists argue that if they are indeed superior, what’s to stop them from seeing us as a lesser life form, seeing us the way we see flies. other insects, and other creatures in general? What’s to stop them from seeing us as nothing more than pesky flies to swat and exterminate at their will? The answer is nothing!!!.. Many scientists think we should stop sending out messages to make contact. Citing the old adage, “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”… lol Maybe our karma for killing so many flies is to one day become the flies ourselves.. Don’t think that’s possible? Well scientists live by a few little sayings. And one of them simply put is, “if something can happen it probably will.” If these alien folk are advanced enough to bend the fabric of space and time to reach the Earth from a vast distance. Trust me, they’ll see us the way we see flies. The best we can do technologically is an electric car or a smartphone. LOL… Our voyages into space are “hokey” at best, and at speeds so slow we can’t really go anywhere. By contrast this advanced race we’re trying so hard to attract would be so advanced they can warp space and time to arrive here quickly from vast distances, or even across universes. Most scientists think we’re fucked if the wrong alien race were to find us, because the Earth is rich in resources.
If they do show up here… We best hope they’re an enlightened superior race, and not a race with a ship fully stocked with the human equivalent of fly strips, or bug/human zappers… (just sayin’)
So in closing, before you kill a fly, or some small animal like a squirrel or chipmunk with a bee-bee gun or a 22 (mentioned for any red necks reading me).. At least FIRST consider the fact that the thing you’re killing values its own life, JUST AS MUCH as YOU value yours. And just because you don’t understand how it values its life, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t.
But please understand this… Everything is energy, and everything means EVERYTHING!! And we’re all connected. And all……… means ALL, not just people.
–Cheers
**Please keep in mind this article isn’t about the lifespan of an animal. What’s discussed here in the science sections is about the given animal’s “time perception” of said lifespan. It’s all theory of course, we can’t talk to a fly or a lizard and find out how they perceive time. However, the universe is studied through math. And Einstein’s theories hold up pretty well to the scrutiny of the average and above-average whiteboard math junkie.
