The 2011 movie “In Time” is set in a sci-fi dystopia where instead of money,
time is the world’s primary currency. People stop aging at 25 and when the clock on their
arms reaches zero, they die. What if this world was closer to reality than fiction?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question: what if time was currency?
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First, we have to look at where money comes from, to work out how “time” would function in the same
context. Money was one of the earliest inventions of mankind, along with systems of trading and
exchanging commodities for other commodities. If thousands of years ago you were a goat farmer,
you might trade some of your goat’s milk with a baker to get some bread,
and so on. Of course, not everybody produces things that can immediately be traded, which is
why we need money as a go-between. We’ve had money and trade for significantly longer than we’ve had
the current economic system of capitalism, which is 500 years old at the longest and 200 years old
at the shortest. The industrial revolution and European colonialism led to capitalism becoming
the economic system that dominates the world. Modern currency, in the form of physical
or digital money, really only works because everybody agrees to use it.
Most countries have abandoned the gold standard; cryptocurrency has no physical equivalent at all.
The value of money is generally arbitrary and tied entirely to demand. It’s so arbitrary that
many countries have made the mistake of trying to simply print more money to pay off their debts,
causing hyperinflation. The most famous cases of hyperinflation were seen in Weimar Germany
in the 1920s, where people were forced to take wheelbarrows full of money just to buy bread, and
in modern Zimbabwe, where you can get single notes worth hundreds of billions of Zimbabwean dollars.
The printing of new money has to be very closely regulated in order to keep inflation
within a reasonable limit, with wages and prices rising to ensure things generally stay the same.
But would we have to worry about any of this at all if our primary currency was time itself? Well,
that all depends on where we’re getting “time” from. Time is notoriously difficult to define.
We know time passes and that it only passes in one direction,
we know it’s the fourth dimension of spacetime as described by Einstein,
and that we only have a certain amount of time before we inevitably die.
We also know, thanks to Einstein, that time is relative. For example, a clock moving away from
an observer would be measured to tick more slowly than a clock within their inertial
frame of reference. Once these clocks were brought together, into the same inertial frame,
they would have fallen out of sync. Time can also start and stop; there was neither time nor
space in the singularity before the Big Bang; if the universe one day contracts in a Big Crunch,
the same will hold true again. There are also singularities within our own universe – black
holes, bizzare points of spacetime where the laws of physics break down.
So, it’s difficult to imagine there being a “source” of time that could be exploited
in the way that you can mine for say, gold. Human beings do all have a finite amount of time
to live, however – but without being able to see the future, we can’t predict how much time each
person has left. We could solve this by mastering time travel one day, but we’d have to master
travelling both forwards and backwards through time, to report the results. However, going
backwards in time would involve going faster than the speed of light and many physicists believe
that this is impossible. It might also generate strange paradoxes; then again, these paradoxes
could also be taken as evidence to support the idea that time travel just isn’t possible.
But even supposing that we did find a way to time travel,
building a database of life expectancies would involve sending people to the future,
just to write down when people will die, and then travelling back in time to submit their data.
This seems like far too much effort to go to just for the sake of producing an alternate currency,
and there still wouldn’t be a way to change how much time people have – you’d just have created
creepy death counters for everybody. It’s also highly questionable whether people would want
to know how much life they had left. While it might prod us to live our lives to the fullest,
it would also create a dark cloud over everything we did. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss!
A more feasible method to enforce a time-based currency would be by first mastering life,
death, and immortality. If you could find a way to keep people eternally young and then implement a
literal time-bomb that would kill them if they let their clock reach zero, then you could monetize
time without having to redesign the entire universe. The promise of immortality and eternal
youth might be enticing enough to get people to buy into this society, dystopian as it may be. Or,
such a system might be imposed on them by force, by some hypothetical dictatorial overlords.
Bizarrely, there is a precedent for humans creating time-based currencies,
albeit without the fatal consequences for “In Time’s” characters. From the 19th century on,
a number of socialists have run experiments that implement “time-based currencies”, where
people earn “credit” for the amount of time they work. This isn’t the same as just working for an
hourly wage in standard employment, and the idea has developed into the modern concept of
“Timebanking”. “Timebanking” is a labor model based on reciprocity and community cohesion,
where someone would offer a service to their community and get another service in return,
different from simply volunteering to help. And strange as this is, when time-based
currencies have been trialed in these small experiments, they’ve been pretty popular.
It’s all based on the idea that time is already a currency. We’re all born with a certain amount of
time and we use that time to perform tasks, such as working, in return for money. And generally,
people on lower incomes do more demanding jobs for longer hours and less pay.
“Time is money” is a popular idiom for a reason, and that reason is that for every hour you work,
you create wealth and value for the company you work for, even if you work for yourself.
Given that richer people can often have higher life expectancies than poorer people – owing to
their ability to buy healthier food; afford better healthcare; and perform jobs that don’t require
dangerous, manual labor – money and the human lifespan are already inextricably linked. And just
like time, if you completely run out of money, you will suffer a greatly reduced standard of living
that could send you to an early grave. If we truly could impose eternal youth,
potential immortality, and time limits on people’s lifespans, the world wouldn’t actually be too
dissimilar to the one portrayed in “In Time” or the earlier stories it borrows from. Just as there
are a select few billionaires who have accumulated unprecedented wealth, there would be people who
hoard huge quantities of time, effectively living forever. If you have enough time to ensure that
your material needs are met – food, water, housing, etc. – you’ll have ultimate freedom.
But while having total freedom and living forever sounds great, as with the super-rich
already in existence, the vast majority of people wouldn’t enjoy this privilege.
In 2020, it was estimated that there were around 20 million millionaires in the entire world,
and just shy of 2100 billionaires. That’s a small fraction of the 7.8 billion people in
the world – far lower than 1%. In fact, there are an estimated 150 million homeless people in the
world; this means that people are 7.5 times more likely to be homeless than to be a millionaire.
It’s difficult to imagine this being any different with time as the driving currency,
if time could be exchanged between people and used in the exact same way real money is. There
could be a minimum wage for time and measures in place to make sure it’s not too easy for people to
spontaneously die because they make a mistake or overspend one month, but the stress of living like
this would certainly take its toll. People living in poverty already suffer tremendous stress,
and that stress would be magnified if you’re constantly at risk of immediately dying.
If the real world is anything to go by, most people would be perpetually on the
brink of running out of time and suffering dire consequences, making this world a nightmare
through-and-through. And that’s what would happen if time was currency.
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