Have you ever had the experience that time speeds up when you are enjoying yourself or that it slows down when you are bored? That is an example of time dilation as a subjective human experience. A more objective example would be if you were near a black hole; time would pass much slower for you and much faster for the people back on earth. When you got back, theoretically, maybe only a month will have passed for you, but, for them, it would have been a very real lifetime. Non-theoretical (that is verifiable) examples of this are the varying lifespans of our fellow earthlings. To a two-thousand-year-old tree, or certain species of aquatic animals, a human lifetime may seem absurdly short– It may even appear irrelevant. Naturally we beg to differ, to us the weeklong life of a house fly may seem insignificant, but, to the fly, its full natural lifespan must seem as full of meaning and importance to it as our 80-year life span to us. To fallaciously reason, that a living beings natural lifespan is “only” a few days/months/years is no reason to deprive them of those precious moments of existence, to us a day is just “a day” but to (let’s say) a rat, (who’s natural lifespan runs about 3 years) when caught in one of our sadistic traps while scavenging for scraps to life upon, it is the equivalent of months of agony. Call me “crazy” but just because someone’s actions might inconvenience me, I do not find it a valid excuse to torture and murder them.

Due to our naturally egocentric anthropocentrism, many people will have difficulty grasping (or refuse to accept) this concept, but the fact remains, all things being equal, on what logical grounds could we expect kindness or even just a difference from those who have power over us if we are unwilling to grant the same to those over whom we ourselves have power. Some studies now affirmatively suggest that the less complex an organism (like say a worm on a hook), the more pain it is evolutionarily conditioned to feel in order to learn deterrents (as opposed to say mammals with our greater memory and conceptual ability). This brings up the very real ethical possibility that (if we are being intellectually honest is very difficult to dismiss) for example, even people already living a vegan lifestyle could be doing more to minimize causing avoidable harm. All this is not to suggest that we should fall into a paranoid spiral of reductio ad absurdum, but rather that if we are indeed committed to being moral agents in this world that we should work to reduce suffering (and improve well-being) wherever we can. Afterall if I argue the root of all human evil is the willful ignorance of Tribalism than the natural transcendence of that primitive state is the expansion of our fear of Compassion to all the other Earthlings.