If 1 second of flat human time, and by flat I mean the supposition that 1 second of time is not multiplied by all the beings who live it, is equivalent to a minute of flat time for a single cell, then our bodies are literally producing unimaginable quantities and modes of time.

It is estimated that our bodies are comprised of ~70 trillion cells of which around 40% are not from our parents, and are bacteria (not actually human in terms of being generated by sperm/egg union). We acquire these post-partum from the living environment of Earth.

If a single second is equivalent to about a human minute for a single cell (due to its small size and unusual forms of molecular interaction, i.e. ‘experience’) then one second, for your body alone, is 133,181,126.33 years of cell-time. Even if a second is ‘the same’ for our cells, a second of body-time is equivalent to 2,219,685.43 years of biological time. And that’s if we ignore the temporalities produced relationally »between cells and cohorts of cells.

This is a form of intelligence far beyond anything we have conceived of. Yet we are »made of it.

These cells are parsing reality according to differences between molecules. They form networks of unspeakable sophistication – and dissolve them… in fractions of temporality we have no words for.

If you’re not yet astonished, magnify 2.2 million years of direct experimental sophistication by the number of distinct cells on Earth at this moment. Multiply that number by the number of different modes that distinct organisms produce, locally, and distributively.

In this crucially important sense, Life on Earth is incalculably older than anything modern humans are usually capable of considering, let alone counting. In fact, they are vastly older than ‘The Universe’ in our flat-time estimates. Indeed, any single organism you may encounter, is almost certainly older than the universe. Organisms are to Time as stars are to Light. They create time and each form, and its relations create new forms of time.

Different kinds and sizes of organisms (and all of the relationships between them) literally produce new forms of temporality simply by existing. The flattened (everyone experiences the same second) Time as commonly conceptualized by humans literally only exists in their minds. There’s no such thing as flat time in Nature.