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70 laps around the sun

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.

Image of Earth and its moon taken from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at a distance of 142 million kilometers.
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.

Einstein’s explained his most famous theory with a description of a bolt of lightning striking a train and how it might appear at different times to two people based on their positions and movement.
*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.

Artist Cicero Moraes created an image of the first homo sapien based on a skull believed to be 300,000 years old

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.

We are traveling in multiple cosmic planes all at once.

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. ↩︎

Walls, bridges, and baboons

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The wind-swept sand dunes of the Colorado Desert in California.

We may think we’re Great, but, alas, we’re still Apes

ON A DRIVE FROM Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California, I was captivated by the ever-changing, surreal topography. But two human-made structures punctuated the natural landscape in a way that got me to thinking about how much our species has in common with baboons.

Yes, baboons. But first, a bit about the scenery.

Sherry imitates a towering saguaro cactus
in the Arizona desert.

On Interstate 8, it seems the moment you traverse the border at the Colorado River, the saguaro cacti disappear. It’s as though these succulents, with their iconic outstretched arms reaching for the sky, are a proprietary brand of the Copper State.

Not to be outdone, the Golden State immediately presents you with the quintessential sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, sculpted by the wind into smooth giant hills, resembling mounds of poured sugar. Except for the occasional Joshua tree, yucca plant, or creosote bush struggling to survive, the dreamy-yet-desolate terrain seems right out of Lawrence of Arabia. You might expect to see the titular character bouncing astride a loping camel, kicking sand in the air with its hooves. The distant silhouette of the Chocolate Mountains adds to the backdrop, as though painted on a movie-set canvas.

It is just past the dunes that I-8 veers directly south and then hugs the international border with Mexico. It is here that you will be introduced to The Wall.

Structure No. 1: The Wall

DEVOID OF EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF AESTHETICS, the giant black fence of solid steel thrusts discordantly out of the terrain. To put it in today’s lingo: the wall is photobombing the vast, arid landscape. The Wall serves its utilitarian purpose, but with mixed results, as has been true of such barricades for millennia. Its xenophobic ancestry can be traced to the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and in more modern times, the Berlin Wall.

Ineffective though it may be, The Wall’s brutalist design sends an unambiguous political message: KEEP OUT.

The Wall separates the town of Jacumba Hot Springs from its sister pueblo of Jacumé, Mexico.

Continuing west on I-8, the next section of The Wall you will spot is in the diminutive town of Jacumba Hot Springs. This hamlet of 800 or so souls has the privilege of sporting one of the first incarnations of this ugly fortification, erected during the Clinton administration.

I’m not sure who had the bright idea to construct this monstrosity with steel plates left over from the Vietnam War. Maybe some political consultant thought this could be spun as a “swords to plowshares” narrative.

But the irony is just too delectable to ignore. After using this material to violently (and unsuccessfully) invade a far-off land, all in the name of democracy, the U.S. then recycles this war-machine detritus to “protect” itself from huddled masses yearning to be free… Give me your tired, your poor,¹ but not if they are your next-door neighbors, I guess.

All of this is worthy of a treatise on its own, but I’ll have to save that for a later day.

Although the wall in Jacumba is technically on the edge of town, it’s perceived by the villagers as having cleaved their lives in two, since many residents had or still have relatives in the sister pueblo of Ejido Jacumé on the Mexican side. What was once a casual 10- or 15-minute walk can now take a half day of driving — via the nearest “official” border crossing.

There’s plenty more diverse scenery to savor on this leg of the journey, including the Anza Borrego Desert and the Jacumba Wilderness itself. Also worthy of note is Smuggler’s Gulch, named in the 1880s for the cattle rustling that occurred between the U.S. and Mexico — in which direction I’m not sure. Here, in a very narrow canyon, giant sandstone boulders, many the size of a McMansion, teeter on cliffs. These car-crushing rocks appear ready to roll any minute.

Structure No. 2: The Bridge

The Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge,
rises some 440 feet, or 134 meters, from the ground.
Photo by George J. Janczyn. Used with permission².

AS YOU CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY to San Diego, you’ll ascend once again and eventually enter the Cleveland National Forest. You will then be confronted with a deep canyon that would be impossible to traverse in any vehicular manner were it not for a unique marvel of engineering.

This is the second of the two aforementioned structures that brought baboons to mind (yes, I’m getting to that). And it is officially known as the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the engineer who managed the project. But it is more commonly referred to as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge.

Now — full disclosure — I’m a bit biased when it comes to comparing walls to bridges³. The former is there to exclude one group of humans from another. The latter, on the other hand, intends to unite us.

At the time of its completion in 1974, the Stone Valley Creek Bridge was the highest concrete girder viaduct in the world. That is impressive. But for me, what is even more inspiring is how Greer and his team accomplished this feat utilizing such an elegant design.

The segmented cantilevered method used to hold the road bed aloft is a clever Y-shaped row of pillars. Moreover, the entire ensemble seems to at once blend in with its environs and enhance the scenery at the same time.

I can’t think of many “man-made” structures that can do that.

The backstory on this span across Stony Creek is a fitting juxtaposition to The Wall in Jacumba. Greer rerouted I-8 to save the town of Pine Valley, for which I’m sure its citizens are forever grateful.

The Wall cuts a town in two; The Bridge saves a town. You can see where this is all heading and that is why it is now time to cue the baboons.

EQ vs. IQ

I CAN’T SAY I HAD EVER HAD even a modicum of interest in learning about these distant primate cousins of ours until 2019. At the time, Sherry and I were hiking in the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Although the Cape feels like the edge of the world, this walk did not seem particularly remote. There’s plenty of fellow tourists and the trail is clearly marked. There is even a restaurant at the summit.

A baboon mother and child, resting in the shade in Table Mountain National Park, on the Cape of Good Hope
in South Africa

But to our surprise that day, a mother baboon with a child in tow casually crossed our path and then nonchalantly sat on a wall, seemingly oblivious to our existence. We stopped for a while to grab a video but kept our distance, out of respect.

I was inspired by that incident to read up on baboons and came across A Primate’s Memoir, by renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who had spent decades living among and studying these animals in eastern Africa.

To look at them, you’d notice very few physical characteristic similar to homo sapiens. Baboons walk on all fours, have a snout that seems to be a cross between a dog and a bear, and possess enormous, menacing canines just for good measure. They have tails and sleep in trees.

And to be sure, baboons do not make things, like walls and bridges. So what do we have in common?

Baboons are very social creatures, notes Sapulsky. They live in groups ranging from a few to fifty. They “work” a four-hour day, which is all the time they need to forage for food. They sleep another 10 hours. And that provides them with a full 10 hours to interact with one another.

And interact they do. They make friends; they make enemies. They establish hierarchy that can be inherited. If you are the offspring of the alpha male, you have it made. There are prom kings and queens, and wallflowers. They woo, they mate, they raise their offspring.

They can be snobby. They might bully. They can be empathetic. They can plot and form alliances to outmaneuver rivals. They seek revenge, often very viciously. They are not above kidnapping.⁴

Sounds a lot like a Netflix eight-episode dramatic series. It should not be surprising, then, that baboons seem to reflect so much of human behavior, since we still share 94% of the same DNA.⁵

We have certainly progressed intellectually far beyond the capacity of any of our ancient ancestors. We have self-awareness, sophisticated language, arts and sciences. We build not only walls and bridges but amazing technology. But let’s face it: our emotional intelligence, or EQ in modern parlance, hasn’t evolved at the same pace. That stuff has gotta be buried very deep in that 94% DNA we have in common.

As the old saying goes, we’re just apes with nukes. And that’s never been truer — or a scarier thought — than it is today.

Curiosity, the cat, and the Doomsday Clock

FROM THE MOMENT OUR ANCESTORS descended from the trees, we have been testing the law of unintended consequences. We discovered fire, brought it into our caves, where, along with warming our hands, we inhaled smoke and developed lung cancer. We hunted megafauna to extinction. We created factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels that are cooking our planet, which, by the way, is our one and only ride through space.⁶

The list of things we have tried that have backfired is seemingly endless.

The Wall hasn’t stopped people from attempting to cross the border. It has, however, created a thriving underground economy — literally. Tunneling under the wall is a big business. And coyotes — guides who charge a fee to smuggle people across the border — are making money, sometimes simply scamming destitute El Norte-bound travelers out of their last pesos.

For the most part, we’ve tested this law of unintended consequences in the physical world. We more or less understand this tangible realm. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can grasp it not only intellectually but emotionally.

But the virtual world is different. Whereas in the physical world, the intended purpose of a bridge is obviously distinct from a wall, in the virtual world, things get blurry in a hurry.

Our past meets our future: A prehistoric human hand connecting with a robot hand. Image, appropriately enough, is AI-generated.

In the 1990s I was working in Silicon Valley at the very infancy of the Internet. In those days, the buzz phrase du jour was “democratization of information.” Everyone would have an equal voice and be able to project that voice to the world. That bridge quickly became a wall when corporate interests privatized the internet, rewarding our worst instincts to drive their ad-based revenue models. And that’s where our baboon behavior just became amplified. Bullying, hate crimes, tribalism.

Emotionally, we just can’t keep up. Technology is advancing at a logarithmic pace, but the areas of the human brain that deal with emotion — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, hippocampus — continue to evolve linearly at, well, a snail’s pace.

In the brave new world, the scale at which our endeavors are likely to backfire is exponential.

With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are being promised new and greater opportunities without any idea of what the scope of the consequences will be. It reminds me of the story about the moment just before the first test of an atomic weapon, when Enrico Fermi mused that there was a greater-than-zero chance the explosion would ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. ⁷

And yet, we did it anyway.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but humans somehow keep on ticking.

Yes, we have somehow survived — so far. But there’s something else ticking, coming from the Doomsday Clock, which is now at a mere 89 seconds before midnight, its most dire setting since the metaphorical instrument was created in 1947. To put this into perspective, the clock stood at 7 minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Eighty-nine seconds before midnight. Will you look at the time? It’s getting late. And on that note, sleep tight.

FOOTNOTES

Paraphrased from the poem, The Collosus, by Emma Lazarus. The poem is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ↩︎
Creative Commons License 4.0. ↩︎
My reverence for bridges was further instilled by my father, a civil engineer who designed and oversaw construction of numerous spans in his career. I remember as a child driving to Long Island and crossing the newly opened Verazzanno-Narrows in 1965, then the longest suspension bridge in the world,³ as dear old Dad regaled his offspring with myriad facts about the engineering marvel holding our rattling little Rambler station wagon some 228 feet (70 meters) above the water. ↩︎
Sapulsky cautions against anthropomorphism, using terms such as kidnapping to describe baboon behavior. ↩︎
Even higher with chimpanzees: 96%. ↩︎
Humans would not survive the massive doses of radiation they would sustain in a journey to Mars. The proposals by megabillionaire oligarchs to inhabit other planets is pure folly with today’s technology. ↩︎
Fermi jokingly offered to take bets, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wagering that such a catastrophe would occur, because if it did, collecting one’s payout in a planet engulfed in flames might be a tad difficult. ↩︎