When the Mars Rover landed on Mars, it was 11 light minutes from Earth (meaning that it would take a radio signal 11 minutes to get from Earth to Mars).
If NASA sent a signal to the Rover saying “go left at 5 mph”, the Rover would get that signal in 11 minutes from when we sent it.
If a rock crushed the Mars Rover, we wouldn’t know about it for 11 minutes here on Earth.
If we knew that 5 minutes from now, a rock was going to crush our Rover, is there anything we would do about it? No. it takes our signal too long to get there. No action on Earth can affect anything on Mars for 11 minutes.
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A rock could have already crushed the Rover 5 minutes ago – can we know about it? No. Can Congress suddenly cut NASA’s budget because the Rover was smashed? No. We have no way of knowing about anything happening on the surface from 11 minutes ago until now.
So we have a band of 22 minutes where nothing we do on Earth can possibly affect the Rover on Mars, and nothing that happens on mars can affect the Earth simply because there’s no way for the information to get to us (or the Rover) in time.
Past events are those that can influence the present. Your birth is now the reason you are reading this sentence. The future consists of all the events that the present can influence. The flower will bloom tomorrow because you planted a seed today.
So where does this window of 22 minutes fit in where the present actions do not influence the future?
It turns out that the events that are neither in the past nor the future are in the elsewhere. No kidding. It’s just a name given to events that cannot be influenced by present actions.
Here’s a video to help explain this concept further:
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