Our fascination with time reflects how much we value it, and by extension how we want to avoid wasting it. Cocaine was widely used in armies during World War I, and other drugs have been given to soldiers at least as far back as ancient Greece. But amping up armies with stimulants goes back way before even the last century.
Figuring out a way to juice soldiers is hardly new the Third Reich’s devastating blitzkrieg invasion of France was powered by amphetamines that kept their soldiers awake for days and extended how long they could march at a time. Not the flying part, obviously, but the staying awake part. Assuming an average speed of 20 mph, that’s more than 13 days without sleep.ĭARPA, the research and development arm of the US Defense Department, is studying birds to see if soldiers can consistently do the same. An article in the New York Times, for instance, points out that bristle-thighed curlews routinely fly as much as 6,000 miles without a stop as they travel from Alaska to the Marshall Islands. If humans can go without sleeping, the world’s militaries would like to know how. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.” They didn’t call him Buzzkill Seneca for nothing. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. Two millennia ago Seneca penned, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Four centuries ago, in William Shakespeare’s Richard II, the eponymous monarch utters the line “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”īut even Shakespeare was late arriving on the wasted-time bandwagon. And we’ve worried about this for quite a while. The folks over at the Oxford English Dictionary say that the word “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language, with the word “year” third, while “day” and “week” both make a showing in the top 20.
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