A reflection on my race through space and time
TODAY, I ACCOMPLISHED AN AMAZING FEAT without even trying. I completed 70 repetitions on the Solar Elliptical Circuit. Yeah, just finished. Going to take a well-deserved nap and then start on 71.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
If that’s not impressive enough, consider this: I am now officially a member of the Trillion Kilometer Club, having earned the distinction when I surpassed that distance as a traveler through space aboard the good ship Mother Earth. I took the scenic route just to rack up more frequent flier points.
You, too, are hitchhiking a little ride through the galaxy, without a guide, I might add.1 But enough about you; it’s my birthday and what I want to delve into is the relationship between time and space and how time flies, except to a common housefly, who doesn’t see time fly by, though the fly can certainly fly.
If you are not thoroughly confused yet, I suggest you continue reading and I’ll do my best to get you there.
Acting my age
YES, I’VE BEEN ALIVE A LONG time. I am now older than the Pope. I didn’t see that one coming. Nor did I ever expect the Pope to be a guy from Chicago named Bob, but I digress. If I really want to feel like I have been occupying Earth for a very long stay, though, I look to the average housefly.
I’ve been thinking about these unwanted creatures as of late because we are residing in a cozy flat in London, where the weather has been uncharacteristically warm and this being Europe, our only source of ventilation is open windows, which have no screens. This provides our friends musca domestica easy access to our abode. Despite being informed that they are very much not welcomed here, they continue to come and go as they please. Maybe they don’t understand “shoo!” in my American accent.
The only redeeming quality of these winged nuisances is that they live but a few short weeks. So I can gloat that I have outlasted any member of this insect family by a factor of 1,100 to one.2 Compared to them, I have been in existence for eons. But, as the saying goes, there’s always two sides to the story.
A different point of view
FROM THE FLY’S PERSPECTIVE, my way of viewing the time-space continuum is obviously lacking.
That’s because this little insect has vastly superior optic sensors, compared to a human’s.
A human’s eyes scan at the rate of about 60 hertz, which means that in one second we are seeing 60 separate, sequential flashes of light as it reflects off objects into our field of vision. But a fly scrutinizes its surroundings at a refresh rate of between 250 to 400 times per second.
The higher scanning rate means that to the fly, paradoxically, time moves more slowly than it does to humans.
This is why it’s so darn difficult to nail one of these guys. When you extend your arm with a swatter in hand and swing at that unwanted visitor perched on the window sill, you see your action as a blur of motion. With your wrist and your elbow acting as a compound fulcrum, the flat surface of the fly swatter is being leveraged to move at almost 100 kilometers per hour. But to that little speck of an organism, you are reenacting a slo-mo replay of a batter striking out at the World Series. You think you almost had the bugger, but it is actually observing you approaching at a snail’s pace and, biding its sweet time, the critter nonchalantly performs an acrobatic airlift-evacuation out of the strike zone.
While the speed of the world appears to be dragging to that miniature entity in an exoskeleton, its brain is actually operating at a very rapid rate. Compared to a human, the information gleaned from the fly’s vision is analyzed nearly instantaneously. Part of that is bio-mechanics. The neurons have a shorter distance to travel,3 allowing the information from its eyes to reach the processing unit, aka the brain, more quickly. So the entire cycle — information input, computing, then firing of neurons — triggers a near-instant reflex.
A minute in the life of a human brain
THE FLY HAS ANOTHER ADVANTAGE. Its minuscule brain (a millionth the size of a human’s) is unencumbered by all the cross-channel talk, the ambient noise that is rattling around and interfering with the signal of electrical impulses that are pulsating through the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes inside our skulls. We are thinking about the past, the present and the future, usually all at once and muddled with emotions — regret, ambition, anxiety, anger, surprise, sadness, love, grief, and fear among others– when we should be trying to focus on being in the moment.
For example, imagine you are stuck in stop-and-go traffic while on a conference call because last quarter’s numbers were down and now your boss is rambling on about another reorg and of course replacing everybody with AI and you are wondering why you are even trying to keep your job maybe now is the time to open that studio in the Andes where you can teach dance to little Peruvian children — did you just think “children?” Oh geez you are late picking up your own kid you know something’s going on with them they are at that age but this could be something else should you send them to a doctor and if so what kind of doctor and — look out! That guy is obviously texting. Idiot. Jesus! — You mean the guy is an idiot, not Jesus — Doctors what about them did you or did you not already pay that $1,250 deductible to the hospital can’t believe it for just an outpatient procedure to remove a tiny benign mole what good is health insurance anyway premiums always going up better keep the job though just for the insurance — The Andes some little Peruvian village like that one in the David Attenborough special he is such a treasure you just want to be anywhere other than in this traffic do you even remember a plié from a pirouette? — Look out for that guy in the Camaro weaving in and out like he’s going to win some race — we’re all stuck in this traffic buddy — he thinks he’s special everybody thinks they’re special — Oh, what to do about dinner are you really going to see family for Thanksgiving you know how that will end whose turn is it to cook tonight should you pick something up you just missed the exit for Whole Foods well you have to get off in two exits to pick up the kid, did you forget, again? — You are a good person and a good parent, aren’t you? Of course you are. Yes, you are, at least you try that’s what’s important. Did your very best friend really say at lunch you should maybe switch to a different therapist what a thing to say, weird — Uh oh there’s the exit maybe you can still make it nope whoa nope — wow, that was close, focus, focus — yeah everybody quit your honking gotta get out, just let me get off yeah I get it you’re pissed OK got it. Jesus. People. What is with them. Your back hurts who designs these car seats they’re made for chimpanzees not humans.
Indeed, the fly has none of that stuff going on in its noggin so the little guy can just relax and when necessary react, all by reflex. Lickety-split.
Time is qualitatively relative, according to Einstein, sort of
THE FLY’S LIFE IS ABOUT QUALITY, not quantity. In just 28 days, this tiny being goes through four stages from egg, to larva, to pupa and then adult.
Day twenty-eight is the culmination of a fulfilling life. By the end they are wistfully reminiscing about the crazy things they did as pupae and how did they even make it to adulthood? Seems so long ago, now. And it would seem long ago to you, too, if you viewed the entire world at the pace of a Powerpoint™ presentation. Dear God, next slide, PLEASE.
This perspective is a nice twist on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The relativity part is just that: Time is relative to the observer, based on the observer’s motion through space.
Photo by Doris Ulmann. Creative Commons license.
Fun fact: Flies love life. Sure, they have some work to do propagating their species, laying or fertilizing eggs, and of course watching out for predators, but other than they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. That’s why they are always buzzing with excitement and I have the empirical evidence to prove my assertion.
Now, at this point, you may be questioning my authoritative proclamations in the field of etymology or entomology, whichever of those has to do with insects. True, I’m no scientist, but my cousin was and so I think I’m qualified in today’s government to run pretty much anything from NASA to the NIH. But I digress.
Anyway, the reason flies buzz with excitement is very simple: Everything smells and tastes great!4 And, of course, I mean EVERYTHING.
So what’s not to like when you’re a fly? We are repulsed at the thought of some lowly bug having such an unrefined palate, but that’s just how we humans are, always looking at the world as though it revolves around us, despite being schooled by Copernicus hundreds of years ago to the contrary. We wallow in denial while the fly is just eating up life. And then it dies. But what a life, right? That’s what all that buzzing is about.
We are evolution’s latecomers
SHORT THE FLY’S LIFE APPEARS TO US, but that is just another human judgment. As I think about it now, I’m being very egocentric in just comparing my individual life to be worth more than one thousand generations of these insects.
That’s because members of musca domestica have been gracing the earth for 65 million years. Homo sapiens entered the picture just 300,000 years ago. Compared to flies, we are maybe in the larval stage of evolution.
Flies, as I mentioned, are not burdened with all the crazy thoughts going through our brains. But if they could think, they would undoubtedly wonder why it is that after being on this planet for so long without a care in the world they were invaded by this ugly bipedal beast that seems compelled to continually thrust one of its giant limbs at them in very slow motion. And, undoubtedly, they would find that very annoying and maybe decide to put together some type of eradication program. What to use? Hepatitis, typhoid, cholera might come to their diminutive minds.
Let’s do some fun math (yes, that is a thing)
OUR WAY OF MEASURING TIME is at once arbitrary, parochial and one-dimensional.
We are gauging our existence based on our travels aboard one watery orb as it completes one ellipse around an incandescent fireball. We mark that complete orbit as a unit of time we call a year.
But we are actually advancing in four distinct directions across the x,y, and z axes (height, width and depth) all at once. First, we are zipping around as the earth itself rotates. While we move in that circular motion, we are also orbiting the sun. Meanwhile, the sun itself is completing its own 240-million-year spin around our galactic neighborhood we call the Milky Way, and it’s dragging the entire solar system along for the ride. And finally, the Milky Way is spiraling around a black hole. So we are moving in multiple directions simultaneously. Makes me dizzy just thinking about it, never mind doing it. If you really want to be a daredevil, you can add a fifth cosmic plane just by, well, jumping out of an airplane.5
So here’s how a 70-year-old human achieves the Trillion Kilometer Club:6
- Earth’s rotation for 365 days X 70 years = 1.025 billion Km
- Earth’s orbit around the sun X 70 years = 65.8 billion Km
- Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way = 441.8 billion Km
- Milky Way’s spiral around a black hole = 866.9 billion Km
- Grand total = 1.376 trillion kilometers
That’s why measuring time based on just the one dimension of Earth’s orbit around the sun is pretty silly if you ask me.
And here’s a fun thought: As you will notice from the numbers above, we’re going faster in each of those cosmic planes until we get to the Milky Way, which is spinning at .07% of the speed of light. As we approach the speed of light, time decelerates. This phenomenon neatly parallels the fly’s paradox, in which its vision –viewing the world at a higher scanning rate — creates an impression of time slowing down.
The sun, by the way, is just one of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy and our little heat pump is in a rather remote location at that. There may be 2 trillion or so galaxies in the universe. So 2 trillion times 400 billion is … well, let’s just say it’s a pretty big number.7 All that inter-spinning and gravitational pull and there are black holes creating a warp in the space-time fabric and now scientists think time can go backwards. So what does a “year” really have to do with anything?
Our measurement of time is subjective, but it gives us humans comfort, a sense of relevance. Some folks, as they reach my age, like to console themselves by saying “70 is the new 60.” But I prefer another aphorism: “You’re only as old as you feel.” And I feel old. I’ve got the typical aches and pains to prove it.
But I’m not that old when compared to the universe, which in a blaze of light blasted into reality some 13.8 billion years ago. My time on Earth is only .0000000005 percent of the existence of our universe,8 which means I have been around for only a very, very, very small fraction of all that has happened.
From that perspective, I feel like someone who arrives at some shindig a little late and then blurts out: “What did I miss? Let’s get this party started!”
FOOTNOTES:
- A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a novel by Douglas Adams. ↩︎
- Approximation. If the average fly lives three weeks, then the math would be (52/3) X 70 = 1,213. If we use 4 weeks, then the math is (52/4) X 70 = 910. So I’m splitting the difference at 1,100. ↩︎
- Neurons, which move through nerves, are actually slow travelers when compared to electrons zipping through a copper wire. ↩︎
- Flies do not possess an olfactory organ or taste buds, of course. They use tiny sensilla, or hairs, that cover their body to do the equivalent of smelling and use tiny organs on their feet for tasting. ↩︎
- Technically, just moving in any direction will provide you with the Fifth Cosmic Plane, which sounds like a recently discovered bootleg album by Pink Floyd from the 1970s. ↩︎
- The details on those calculations were computed using perplexity.ai and are as follows:
1. Earth’s Rotation
At the equator, Earth spins at 1,670 km/h. Over 70 years:
Distance = Speed × Time
= 1,670 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years
= 1.025 billion km.
2. Earth’s Orbit Around the Sun
Earth travels 940 million km/year in its orbit:
Total distance = 940,000,000 km/year × 70 years
= 65.8 billion km.
3. Sun’s Motion Through the Milky Way
The Sun moves at 720,000 km/h relative to the galaxy:
Total distance = 720,000 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years
= 441.8 billion km.
4. Milky Way’s Galactic Rotation
The Milky Way rotates once every ~240 million years, and the Sun orbits the galactic center at ~720,000 km/h. Using the galaxy’s diameter (100,000 light-years ≈ 9.461×10¹⁷ km) and its rotation fraction over 70 years:
Circumference = π × diameter ≈ 2.973×10¹⁸ km
Distance traveled = Circumference × (70 / 240,000,000)
= 866.9 billion km.
Total Distance Traveled
Summing all components:
1.025B km (rotation) + 65.8B km (orbit) + 441.8B km (Sun’s motion) + 866.9B km (galactic rotation)
= ≈1.375 trillion km (1.375×10¹² km). ↩︎ - That would equal 80 quintillion stars. This is estimated to be 10 times the number of grains of sand on Earth. ↩︎
- If my math is correct. ↩︎
IRON-AGE EPILOG 