We already know that's not the cause. Time is the same no matter which way you travel through the universe. Time is changed by the speed that you travel through space.

Space and time are supposedly essentially the same thing, so it is. Space expanding is what caused the Big Bang; no space can be said to have existed prior to the Big Bang. Perhaps the inherent potential for space is what triggered the expansion in the first place.

However, what we perceive as time is just a reconfiguration of matter. The events if the past have no material representation aside from that information recorded in the predent; those past events are not real things, in the sense of being things. Our subjective present-- where we collapse probability via observation-- exists about 80 milliseconds retroactive from the objective present, the latter being concurrent with the singularity beyond Planck frequency at the high-frequency termination point of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that from which the Big Bang originates. The original of the universe is a fraction of a second in our future, not billions of years in the past. Only a latent attotechnological observer operating very near the singularity can account for the requisite observer-- as per wave-particle duality-- in the first moments "after" the Big Bang atlnd at the fundamental scale of our apparent material environment.

>Human technology has progressed from millitech, to microtech, to (recently) nanotech, and this essay attempts to start the thinking on femtotech (and attotech). > >This downscaling trend provides a potential answer to the famous “Fermi paradox” (if intelligent life is so commonplace in the universe, “where are they?”). If intelligent creatures or machines can continue to “scale down” in their technologies, the answer to Fermi’s question would become “They are all around us, whole civilizations living inside elementary particles, too small for us to detect.”

-- Ray Kurzweil

Hello u/Awesomazius, your submission "What if time is only going forward because space is expanding?" has been removed from r/space because:

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Well if your assertion was true then spacetime would have near total symmetry & only our perception would make the difference.

Because, since in a collapsing universe time would then run in reverse & that looks like an expanding universe to any perception that relies on entropic increase.

But since we cannot presently model entropically negative perceptions then the question becomes a truism.

What if time isn’t moving at all and it’s just the way our bodies and brains evolved to perceive space time that makes it seem like it moves “forward” from our perspective?

You are essentially correct. Both of these are resultant of increasing entropy. Though neither is directly responsible for the other, they are both reasonable effects of the process of informational encoding. When entropy hits an effective maximum time will become meaningless and space will lose relational cohesion.

No, think about it if time started to move in reverse when space collapses, then all the particles that where moving towards each other would have to trace back to the position the had been which would mean that we are back to space expanding and time therefore would have to start moving forward again which would mean space there would start collapsing again and time would have to go in reverse, which would cause expansion and time to move forward, which would cause collapse and time to reverse....... just an endless loop.