What would life look like if the importance of time and matter flipped. That is, ones success is based on time not things (i.e, money or breeding rights). How would life evolve and more importantly what would it look like... Food for though... Jim www.bionicbros.de

Are you using the word matter to represent material things, not actuall ''matter'' in the pure scientific sense, as in something that has physical dimensions?

The reason I ask is that I think these two things are different. Matter has no value until humans apply some, because this is a largely subjective, arbitrary decision. Why is a rose more ''valuable'' than a dandelion?

If you are asking how the world would be different if most people''s goal was to obtain as much time as possible, as opposed to trying to obtain the most and nicest material posessions possible, then I would have to say we''d all be a bunch of lazy sods because spending time would be like spending money. Of course, unless we were immortal, this wouldn''t matter because we only have a finite amount of time in our lives, whereas the amount of material things you can possess is so great so as to be practically infinite. It would be comparing all the matter in the universe (which has the potential to become ''material goods'' when some value is applied to it by humans) to the short amount of time a human can live...and then only barring some life-shortening event (accident, sickness, death from boredom, etc.).

Interesting question, though.

R.

bionicbros_de,

Perhaps this is already true.

(For ease of typing, in the following I will be using "man" to mean "person". No offense to the many women who make the world go round.)

Some economic theories consider the "man-hour" to be a type of good, with value depending on the laws of supply and demand. The more rare or necessary the activity of the man, the more an hour of his labor is worth. Thus a doctor''s man-hour costs more than a factory laborer''s, because there are more factory workers than doctors (in other words, the supply is smaller), and because doctors save lives while factory workers make widgets (in other words, the demand is greater).

In fact, goods can be thought of solely in terms of man-hours of labor invested. A car''s value is dependent on the value of the man-hours of the salesman, the factory worker, the designer, the miner who mined the iron to make the steel of the car, and so on. So the car has no real value except in terms of the man-hours invested. A car is a good thing to buy because it gives you man-hours back: you can drive somewhere instead of walk It is also valuable because it increases the worth of your man-hours: you can take better-paying jobs that require you to drive a car.

So basically, matter has worth dependent on its usefulness, and its usefulness is created through time invested. We are already buying and selling time. And I argue that things like money are goals only in that with money one can do what one wants with one''s time instead of having to give your man-hours to others in order to live.

By the by: this is a terribly interesting discussion, but what does it have to do with game development? Are you considering a game setting where time is the crucial good?

---------------------------------------------------
-SpittingTrashcan

You can''t have "civilization" without "civil".

It''s true, time is not a dimensional constant. It doesn''t flow uniformly in the universe, it seems that areas of higher energy density bend space, and in those places, the flow of time slows.

"What we call time, is our interpretation the discrepancies in information travel through methods that move slower than the speed of light. So time itself is not quantifiable on a universal scale, because its rate of change changes depending on the curvature of space."

-- Definition in my quantum physics textbook

George D. Filiotis
Are you in support of the ban of Dihydrogen Monoxide? You should be!