How soon is now? It is not just a great song by the Smiths it is truly a subjective experience dependent on many factors the observer rarely notices. It is a very slippery concept because as soon as you notice it, it is past. I used to think it was as small of a measurement as was possible to take, which would be a Planck time unit. But even that seems a bit simplistic, like it doesn’t take into account time dilation. As a thought, big IF, but if you could instantaneously communicate from a spaceship in orbit above a super dense planet, dense enough to warp time, to someone standing on that planet, you would be faced with a frozen person on the other end of the line. The person communicating back to the ship is now in super slow motion from the perspective of anyone on the spaceship. In reality these comms would work like they depicted in the movie Interstellar; it just takes time to communicate due to the signal being sent back and forth between the planet and the spaceship being subject to the dilation of time, but once the signal arrives it sounds fine, it plays in the moment of Now and doesn’t sound slow. Basically, nobody notices a slowness, they only notice the passage of time that it is taking to communicate.
If it were possible to then take the perspective from outside the frame of reference that exists between the spaceship and the crew in the example above, which is a point-to-point line, and isolate the system so that it could be played and rewound, it would show that the concept of Now being held between the two parties communicating is not the same instantaneous moment. They would be like 2 spinning spools where one spins faster and accumulates more time than the other over a shared period. You would be able to see the differential between the lapsing of your independent time separate from the 2 positions and it would appear anyone on the planet is slower and anyone on the ship is faster. From that outside perspective the Now takes longer to pass on the planet then it does on the ship and that their moments of now separate more and more as more time passes. In fact, since they separate you could question were they ever in sync to begin with?
We think of time as a point-to-point line with the moment of now designated as a travelling point and that we all share the same instantaneous moment of Now. Travel back in time and meet yourself and ask when is now and your younger self will answer “now is now” even though you will know that was actually then, it is not now anymore like it was. Stand there talking to yourself and have third yourself approach from the past and ask when will then be now and you both will answer “soon” but that is technically only true for the younger self since for you, the traveler, that soon was some time ago and the third from the past will know it actually won’t be for a long time. In any case, now is only something that can be experienced from the observer point of view and it is the “point” of stream of consciousness sliding along the “line” of its timeline experiencing everything and everyone as if they were also steam of consciousness present in the same moment of Now, but not requiring the stream of consciousness of others to actually be in that same moment.
Also, it is always Now when fast-forward to the “When Will Then Be Now” scene of ‘Spaceballs, the Movie’.