And since this is a SF forum, I wasn't worried about mundane things like how far I've flown or how many miles I've put on my various cars...now, I mean how far have I travelled through the Cosmos.
So I began to put some numbers together: 750Mph for the earth's revolution (I live about 34N lat), 67,000Mph for going around the Sun, 45,000Mph for the Sol System movement inside the Galaxy, 443,000Mph for our movement around the center of the Galaxy, and approximately 1,300,000 Mph our Galaxy is moving through the universe.
Add it up and throw in a fudge factor, and it's close enough to 2,000,000 Mph.
61 years (+15 leap days) at 24 hours a day is 534,720 hours.
So 534,720 x 2,000,000 = 1,069,440,000,000, or over 1 TRILLION Miles.
Which sounds pretty epic, until I realized that distance (if laid out in one straight line) is:
**18% the distance of ONE light year.
**3.7% of the distance to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri
**I'm still within the Oort Cloud limits of our own Solar System--not even in actual interstellar space.....
Conclusions:
--Space is WAY F****** HUGE!!!
--We are WAY F****** TINY.
--I think I need a stiff drink....
Seriously, it sometimes takes calculations like this one to show just how precious this pale blue dot is and how alone we really are on it.
OK, enough caterwauling--back to living and enjoying the remaining 300,000 hours (and 600,000,000,000 miles) or so I've got left.
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