Get Some Perspective!
Recently, a lady friend of mine told me that I need to get some perspective. Lately, I have been withdrawn, introspective, not very social, and in a relatively dour mood. By lately, I mean the last year or so. She’s pretty sick of it, and said it rather angrily to me.
So, you want some perspective? Here you go:
- The current population of the United States of America is approximately 303,014,800. That means that I am 0.0000000033001688366376823838307567815169 of the country.
- The world population is approximately 6,621,687,500. That means I am 0.00000000015101890567925472170047287794841 of the world.
- I weigh approximately 185 lb. The Earth is about 13,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lb. That means I am 1.4015151515151515151515151515152 x 10-23 times the size of the Earth.
- The average circumference of the Earth is 24,880 miles. It would take me about 9 months to walk around the Earth, walking constantly, with no breaks.
- If it were possible, it would take me about 2,652,277 years to walk to the sun, walking constantly, with no breaks.
- The Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 384,000,000,000,000,000 miles from end to end. It would take me about 11 trillion years to walk across the galaxy, again walking constantly and without any breaks.
- The observable universe is approximately 27,000,000,000 light-years across. So, to walk from one end of the observable Universe to the other, it would take me about 4,519,800,000,000,000,000 years, yet again walking constantly with no breaks, no sleep, no nothing but walking.
- If you were to lay 25,959,695,175,456,768,000,000,000,000,000 (about 26 nonillion) people from head to foot – that’s 3,920,404,757,164,509,500,033 times the population of the Earth – that line of people would traverse the diameter of the known universe.
I think that I’m right to say that we are pretty fucking insignificant.
How’s that for perspective?
I remember the Total Perspective Vortex from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series. The idea is that the size of the Universe can be extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake (or a cupcake, for all you unschooled morons). This guy created a chamber which did just that, because his wife kept nagging him about having no sense of proportion. This machine was called the Total Perspective Vortex, and it had an arrow that pointed to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot with a marker that said “You are here”. The net effect of the Vortex is that when you see yourself in relation to the rest of the Universe, you see how really insignificant you really are, and faced with that knowledge, the soul is destroyed.
Can you face your insignificance?
