cliche

Hence the 'assuming that they were'... section at the top. I think you may be taking the question a little literally. I'm not sure that science can, will, or is prepared to provide an answer to the question but the question exists. Like the synaesthetes who see sounds as colours and shapes I'm wondering what unit of time is equivalent to a metre (or any other unit for that matter). It's always struck me that we use time and distance in a very interchangeable manner: in the highbrow concept of spacetime, the standard confusion as to why a lightyear is a measure of distance, and the everyday 'he lives about ten minutes down the road'.

So I guess another answer may appeal to our culture. In early times, a metre would be about a second - that being the pace at which I might walk to the next village. The addition of horseriding to our repertoire might bring this closer to 1/15s. The invention of the telegraph brings us closer to the 1/299792458s mentioned earlier. And perhaps research by Enders and Nimtz has already started to take us even lower (approx 1/1400000000s in one experiment).

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I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. -- John Cage (1912 - 1992)