The Meeting and What It Represents as a Fraction of Remaining Solar Time

The Meeting and What It Represents as a Fraction of Remaining Solar Time

by Leonid Tchah

The meeting began at two o'clock. By two-oh-four I had established, to a reasonable approximation, that human beings have collectively spent somewhere in the region of 10²⁰ minutes in meetings, which is a number so large it briefly stopped functioning as a number and became instead a kind of weather. I set this aside and returned to the present meeting, which was about a process. Specifically, it was about whether the process was working. No one present had a confident answer to this question, which was, I noted, itself a kind of answer, though not the kind anyone seemed prepared to file.

By two-eleven I had moved to the second calculation, which concerned the sun.

The sun has approximately five billion years of hydrogen-burning life remaining. This is 2.628 × 10¹⁸ minutes, which I find to be a more useful unit than years for the purposes of what I was doing, which was determining what fraction of that remaining time was currently being consumed by this meeting. The meeting had been scheduled for one hour. It would, I suspected, run slightly over.

The fraction is small. I want to be precise about how small. If you wrote it out, the numerals would not begin until the seventeenth decimal place, at which point they would briefly appear and then stop. I found this neither comforting nor alarming. I found it, after some consideration, structurally interesting — which is a different thing, and I think an important distinction, though I acknowledge it is not one everyone would make spontaneously.

At two-seventeen someone asked whether the form in question was the same form that had been discussed in the previous meeting or a different form that had since replaced it. This question generated significant discussion. I calculated that the discussion, at its current rate of energy expenditure, would consume approximately 0.0000000000000004% of the sun's remaining output. I did not share this. It did not seem like the right moment, and also I was not finished.

What I was working toward — what the calculation was actually for — was something I can only describe as a proportionality problem. Not in the mathematical sense, or not only in the mathematical sense, but in the sense that I find I cannot locate the correct relationship between the scale of a thing and its significance. The meeting was small. The sun's remaining lifespan was large. These facts existed simultaneously without resolving into any obvious conclusion about how I should feel about being in the meeting, which is what I had originally been trying to determine when the calculation began.

This is, I should acknowledge, not the most efficient way to manage an afternoon. I am aware of this.

At two-thirty-four the question of the form was set aside, not because it had been resolved but because the time allocated for that portion of the agenda had elapsed. A note was made. The note would be circulated. There was, briefly, a discussion about who should receive the note, during which I calculated that the Sun formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a molecular cloud, and that the atoms currently comprising everyone in this room had at that point been distributed across a volume of space roughly 65 light-years in diameter, drifting without administrative function of any kind.

I found this clarifying. I want to be honest that I am not entirely sure what it clarified. The clarification arrived as a feeling of proportion having been correctly established, without the proportion itself pointing toward any particular course of action. I have encountered this before. I have not yet determined whether it represents a failure of the method or a feature of it.

The meeting ended at three-oh-eight, which was eight minutes over the scheduled time, which meant the fraction was slightly larger than I had initially calculated though not meaningfully so — not in any sense that would register against the denominator we were working with. A follow-up meeting was proposed for the following Thursday. Someone asked whether the form would be resolved by then. No one answered directly. The follow-up was scheduled.

I calculated, briefly, whether the follow-up would move the cumulative fraction into legibility. It would not. The total meeting time across both sessions would represent, against the sun's remaining output, a number that continued to arrive too late in the decimal sequence to be practically distinguishable from zero.

I noted this. I am not sure what I expected to feel about it. What I felt was something closer to recognition — the specific sensation of a structure becoming visible that had always been present, which is, if I am being precise about it, the reason I do this at all.

I have filed this as a structures piece. The structure in question is the relationship between the scale at which events occur and the scale at which they are experienced as significant, which do not appear to be the same scale, and which no one has yet adequately explained to my satisfaction. The meeting is a data point. So is the sun. I do not think this is controversial.

The follow-up is Thursday at two.