Reflections on the big Seven Zero

I got a card for my birthday that says something to the effect of how many hours, seconds, and etc. I’ve lived. Seventy is a staggering number. I’ve been around for not quite a third of my nation’s history. It’s a good fraction of the time since my Savior walked the Earth. And it is a drop in the bucket compared to cave paintings found in France and across the world.

But, I decided to change that perspective to distances traveled.

Now, first, I did some generalizations. The earth is 24, 901 miles in diameter and I’m assuming for argument that I live at the equator and I’m sitting on my back porch drinking coffee. That means, if I live at the equator, that I’m traveling at slightly better than a thousand miles an hour because of the Earth’s rotation. Then during the day I travel, even if all I do is sit on my porch all day, 24,901 miles in a single day.

Multiple that times 365 and you get: 24,901 × 365 = 9,088,865. That last is how far I’ll travel in a year if all I take into account is the rotation of the Earth.

So let’s take that number and multiply it by 70. This is what I get: 9,088,865 × 70 = 636,220,550. While an impressive number, it’s still shy of being a billion miles.

But let’s not forget that rotation isn’t the only motion we’re subject too.

Our little rock is hurtling around the sun at an impressive 18.5 miles per second. Keep in mind, our orbit is not a perfect circle, but an ellipse so there’s some fudge factor built into this equation, but our orbital circumference is around 584,000,000 or five hundred and eight four million miles. That’s the distance our Earth travels around the sun in a year. So, let’s do the math on that.

584,000,000 × 70 = 40,880,000,000. That’s forty point eight BILLION miles. Now, that’s impressive mileage, but I still haven’t traveled to the nearest star yet. I’ve barely travelled better than two and a half times the distance of Voyager 1 is from the sun (as of this writing, it’s about 15.8 billion miles from the sun). Heck, I haven’t even made it out to the Oort cloud!

There are still several numbers we need to add to this.

One is how our solar system is moving around the middle of our galaxy. Our Sun, and dragging the solar system with it, is moving at around 143 miles per second. So, let’s figure that one out. In a days’ time, our sun moves 12, 355,200 miles per day. Multiply that by 365 and them multiply it again by seventy and I get 12,355,200 × 365 × 70 = 315,078,240,000. That’s 315 billion miles and change.

Ah, but we’re not even close to being finished with the math.

Our Galaxy is tearing through space at a staggering 1.3 million miles per hour. multiplying all that out, we get 1,300,000 × 24 × 365 × 70 = 797,160,000,000.

There’s a whole bunch of other motions we can add in here such as the speed our local cluster of galaxies is moving and so on and so forth.

And then the sum I’m going to present to you at the end of it all, isn’t truly accurate either. Due to motions of the solar system, galaxy, and so on, some of the motions presented negate each other (translation, some of it points in different directions). But I’m going to ignore that and just come up with a grand total of distance traveled and PRETEND it’s all liner motion in one direction.

So, adding that all up 797,160,000,000 + 315,078,240,000 + 40,888,000,000 + 636,220,550 + 9,088,865 = 1,153,771,549,415 miles.

That’s 1.154 trillion miles in 70 years (assuming liner direction again).

A light year measures a whooping 5.879 trillion miles or 5,878,624,370,000 in long hand.

I’ve barely clocked in about 20 percent of a light year. I’d have to live Biblical long lifetimes to even make a light year!

Considering Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.24 Light years away, I’m barely out the door.

Our galaxy is roughly one hundred thousand light years across, and the edge of the observable universe is some thirteen billion light years away.

Multiplied out in miles, the edge of the universe is roughly 7.642 × 10²², or 7.542 quintillion miles or 76,000,000,000,000,000,000 away. There’s a number you don’t see every day. It’s so huge, it’s almost meaningless. Indeed, AI, when I ran the equation through it, even seemed to cringe (So if you come up with a different value, blame it).

Compare that to the distances I’ve traveled.

I was going to look at that impressive number of what I’ve traveled in seventy years and say, “In your face Captain James T. Kirk!”

But all things considered, I’m still sitting on my porch drinking coffee and enjoying a nice day.