Living in a skyscraper makes us time blind


 Science fiction films often feature megastructures, towering over cities with futuristic or other foreign nuances. In the future, our world will be pictured that way, and it will have an impact on human psychology.

Quoted from IFL Science, living at high altitudes, far from ground, can have a strange effect on the mind and can confuse our sense of time. It seems time would pass differently if we were on a higher ground.


Gravity bends space-time, so the closer you are to a heavy object, the slower time passes. Living in a skyscraper for 70 years (without going down) will make us older by about 0.08 seconds. It's very thin, but it's a sign of change.



Instead of measuring time, it's psychological time that makes the difference, and it all boils down to the Sun. Being very far above, gives us a much wider view of the Earth, stretching the horizon for tens of kilometers if we live in the Burj Khalifa, for example, the tallest building in the world today.


That means, we get a few more minutes of sunshine every day. The sun will rise earlier and set later.

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As reported in Business Insider, in the book Supertall, architect Stefan Al discusses how a simple difference in sunlight can, in the grand scheme of things, have a huge impact. For example, people living upstairs have to wait longer before being able to break their fast during Ramadan.


The impact of the Sun and its rays on our processing of time in our daily lives, has long attracted the attention of researchers. There have been many studies looking at the effects of reduced daylight in the highest latitudes on our planet, and how this affects humans psychologically.


Similarly, during the summer months at higher latitudes, the habits of the inhabitants shift as the lighter hours make us feel that the day feels earlier.


Our body clock is not perfect. Experiments that place humans without sunlight and without looking at the clock have shown this. An experiment conducted last year tested 15 people spending 40 days in a cave. When they came out at the end of the experiment, they believed they had been there for 30 days. Time is relative in many ways.

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