A bit of perspective

This evening, as I was packing up at work to come home, I noticed a most odd light coming through the office window. The windows in our office face west, and through them was coming a bizarre orange light, almost as if there was a fire directly outside. It didn’t make much investigation to find out the source of this glow was a most excellent looking sunset. A small amount of clouds in a most clear sky. All lovely.

A few minutes later, I opened the outside door of the office preparing for a nice walk home on a clear evening. The door to the office faces west, and blimey Charlie, it wasn’t sunny. Not in the slightest. Before me was Glasgow city center sitting under a huge, black, ghost-busters-esque pile of cloud. And we’re talking fire and brimstone black clouds here. Obviously I’d done something to anger the Gods.

Or had I?

So … on earth these days, the estimated population is in excess of 6.5 billion people. That’s 6,500,000,000 people. More than you’re likely to get at you’re average Robbie Williams concert.

To try and make a little more sense of that … let’s say you live to be 80 years old. That’s about 29,220 days. And let’s assume, that for these 80 years you get an average of 7 hours sleep a night. That leaves close to half a million waking hours in your lifetime. If you spent the entire time you were awake (let’s forget eating and anything else you might need to do) meeting people, to get through the world’s population you’d need to meet 13,000 people an hour. Or 216 people per minute. Imagine trying to say hello to more than 3.6 people a second.

Now … those 80 years that you’re alive. It might seem like a long time (especially when you’re saying hello non-stop) but our world has been around for quite a long time. Earth is estimated to have come into existence around about 4.57 billion years ago. That’s about 4,570,000,000 years ago. Suddenly your 80 years isn’t looking that long. Your brief time on this planet will equate to about 1/57,000,000th of it’s age. To put it another way … if the world had been around for 1 year your entire life would equate roughly half a second of that time.

So … are you thinking “Blimey, I’m one person out of 6.5 billion, and I’ll be around for a minuscule amount of time”? Well, hold on there a second.

Let’s take a moment to put this into perspective. According to the greatest scientific minds in the world (also commonly known as Google), there are likely to be at least 70 sextillion stars in the universe. No .. honestly .. .that’s a real number. It’s 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Yup … that’s 22 zero’s there. So that’s quite a lot. Now … our little solar system here is not large by any means .. and we have 10 planets circling our star. Ok, ok. 9 planets, but when I was growing up there was 10. So .. taking us as an average there are probably over 700 sextillion planets in the universe. That makes 23 zeros. I’m not even going to try and quantify that.

So … out of an absolutely mind-blowingly huge number of planets our there, we spend a minuscule amount of time on one of them, surrounded by a massive number of similar people. Kinda insignificant, huh?

OK … so maybe, just maybe it wasn’t anything I did that caused the gods to pile mountains of clouds over Glasgow this evening. But you never know. On the plus side, it also puts into perspective the rest of the things I worry about. Suddenly, stuff doesn’t seem to matter quite as much….

Moo.