Going My Way?

Around this time of year each year, I get a bit introspective.   I've posted my "what I did this year" screeds here in the past, sharing my self reflection.  In the last few years, I haven't really done anything of note, no big risks, no huge failures or successes.  I have just lived, worked and stayed pretty much in one place.

Or have I?

Watching one of the many DC Comics related shows I follow, earlier this year I was struck by a line in the show.  Lucifer toasts a birthday with the line "Here's to one more trip around the sun."

That got me thinking, just how far do we travel as the earth orbits the sun each year?  That led to bigger questions.  And math.

So here's some big, big numbers for you.

I'll be 48 this year, so I'm interested in how far I personally have travelled in that time, but I'll provide a number at the end that will let you calculate your own journey should you be interested.

So, first, we need to know how many hours in my life to date, since the distances are measured in kilometers per hour.  I'll convert to miles at the end of the journey (truth be told I often think in miles per hour, despite being Canadian and mostly metric) and you can convert the individual measurements by multiplying by 0.621.

So in 48 years, including leap years, there have been 17532 days.

24 hours per day, so 420768 hrs in 48 years.

Now, I ballparked about 350640 km in daily commute, from a totally arbitrary number of 20 km/day.  As big a number as that is, it's probably wildly inaccurate.  When you see the end result of the rest of the calculation, you'll see that even if I was off by a huge amount, it hardly matters.

The earth turns around its axis at an astonishing 1000 km per hour (kph), which works out to 420,768,000 km in daily rotation.

The earth orbits the sun at a mind boggling speed of 107,000 kph, totaling 45,022,176,000 km in 48 yearly orbits.

You've all seen pictures of what we think our galaxy looks like.  We are a tiny speck within one arm of our gigantic galaxy.  It turns out that within that arm we "mill about", pushed and pulled by all the various gravitational influences around our star.  We mill about at something like 70,000 kph.  That's 29,453,760,000 km wandering within our little arm of the galaxy.

But that's hardly the end.  Oh no.  Our arm of the galaxy is whipping around the galactic core at an astonishing speed of 792,000 kph.  That's 333,248,256,000 km in 48 years of galactic orbit.

Yet there's still more to add to the final tally.  Our galaxy, like every galaxy, is still moving outward and away from the big bang.  We are flying outward at a nearly unbelievable speed, some 2.1 MILLION kph.  Since I arrived on this little ball of mud, we've been flung a further 883,612,800,000 km.

So in total, since I was born I have travelled 1,291,757,760,000 kms.  That's without any effort on my part.  If you add my arbitrary calculation of the distance I've personally moved over the years, you get 1,291,758,110,640 kms.   As you can see, even if you double, triple, or divide in half the amount of kms that I've travelled under my own steam, it hardly makes any difference to the nearly 1.3 TRILLION kilometers I've travelled in my lifetime.
So, for the metric impaired out there, that's 802,181,568,960 miles (802,181,786,707 miles with personal travel) in my lifetime.

For those interested in calculating their own journey, here's the math.

We are moving a remarkable 3,070,000 km/hr or 1,842,000 miles/hr, all the time

That's 26,893,200,000 km/year or 16,135,920,000 miles/year.

In a leap year, it's 26,966,880,000 km or 16,180,128,000 miles.

You can figure the rest.

So, even in a year (leap, in this case) where I didn't do very much of note, I still managed to travel almost 27 BILLION kilometers.

It's not the years.  It's the mileage.