There's no time

In his book The End of Time, Julian Barbour suggests that time is an illusion – there is just a massive number of ‘nows’ through which we weave a path.

Suppose time is not continuous - like cheese - but is made of lumps - like rice. Each present moment is a grain of time. Suppose there is a moment in which nothing happens. It would not be able to lead to the next moment (because that would be something happening) and so ‘nothing happening’ would herald an eternity of nothingness. Like Adam and Eve in the garden. Time would be stuck. It could not proceed to the next moment.

But in a movie, if two frames are identical, the film does not come to a halt. That is because it is being run through an external time-machine - the projector, which has its own time-agenda. The ‘present moment’ is unique for each observer so perhaps that’s what keeps things rolling along like in the projector. In other words time is kept going by all the observers experiencing the world  together.

There must have been a moment when the last tree was felled on Easter Island, bringing about the collapse of the ecosystem and the devastation of a civilisation. The island became infertile, many statues were left unfinished in the quarries as the population was decimated.

What were they thinking of when that last tree came crashing down?