It's worse than that. You know how astronomers say that certain things we see in the sky actually stopped existing thousands of years ago, because it took so long for the light to reach us?
Well, that applies locally, too. Which means that mountain in the distance is further in the past than the person standing right next to you. Why bother watching a sports event with binoculars? You already missed the play.
Let's make it a bit weirder. If you both synchronize your watches, drive five miles apart, and find each other with telescopes, you're both in each other's past, but your watches will still show the same time. (I mean, it's only about 3 hundred-thousandths of a second in the past, but still.)
If the sun just went out one day, we wouldn't know it for 8 minutes. Lucky for us, we expect it to swell into a red giant, burn off all Earth's oceans and atmosphere and then liquefy the planet, eventually swallowing our little blue marble up before it goes out. And if we're still here a billion years before that, we'll get to watch the slow but inevitable march of our doom.
In any case, 'present' from the human perspective is the moment of cognition, not the moment of origination. Luckily there are very few malicious organisms that can move fast enough to attack us from an unseen place in less than 80ms.
Present from the universal perspective is the moment of origination.
This makes sense, actually: we react to the past by acting in the present and planning for the future.
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