Geeking Out on Numbers and “Star Trek”

Since I wrote my last column, where I referenced the fact that this spring I will reach my 55th birthday, I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about time. And this pondering has led me to, what I believe are several interesting realizations.

For instance, last month I watched the final episode of the Fox TV show, Fringe. I never missed an episode of this show during its run and it concluded after 100 episodes. Each episode required one hour of my time, which means that I spent 100 hours watching this show on TV. And, if you do the math, this means that four days and four hours of my life were spent watching this show. I think it was well worth the investment of time – obviously – but I am sure not everyone will agree.

A new twist on my TV viewing occurred when my son, Andrew, installed Netflix on our Wii in living room. With no experience with Netflix, several weeks passed after he installed it before I finally got around to exploring what all the service had to offer.

You are probably thinking I began to scroll through all the movie offerings I now had access to and, to be truthful, this did cross my mind – but only for a moment. As soon as I was able to navigate the screens properly I went right to Star Trek Voyager. As a lifelong Trekkie, who watched all the original episodes when they aired on network TV, and every other spin-off through the year, never being able to watch a single episode of Star Trek Voyager was a painful void. Now that void is being filled.

Star Trek Voyager originally aired in the latter half of the 1990s and, to my surprise, recorded a total of 168 episodes. If I had watched these episodes through the years when they were originally broadcast my total viewing time would have been 168 hours or one week of my life!

Netflix, however, does not include commercials so the actual time of each episode is approximately 43 minutes. And because I can skip through the opening and ending credits, each episode is actually closer to 40 minutes in length. So, by the time I watch all 168 episodes, I will have devoted another 111 hours (approximately) to my Star Trek fixation and this, in turn, translates to another four days, six hours, and twenty-five minutes of my life.

You can do these calculations with other aspects of your life – consider the amount of time you spend sleeping. If you assume that I sleep an average of eight hours a night, on my 54th birthday last year I had spent 1/3 or 18 years of my life asleep. While I relish sleep and find it more and more difficult to get eight hours of sleep as I age, there is something very depressing about spending 18 years asleep.

What about the time we spend eating? Let’s say we spend one hour each day eating meals (I’m not including preparation time here – just the time we actually spend lifting the food from our plate into our mouths). At the end of a year, 365 hours will have been spent consuming food, which translates to 15.2 days. Thus, on my 55th birthday, I will have spent 836 days eating, or two years, 109.5 days!

You could do this endlessly – and probably become more and more depressed – but I want to return to Star Trek now because a recent episode of Voyager I watched started me thinking about space and time.

The episode I watched involved a set of characters known collectively as “Q.” I won’t bore you with the details, since there are probably only a few of you are reading this who consider themselves Trekkies, but these characters have shown up in every Star Trek series (if you are a Trekkie and watched all the original series you will probably remember Q’s first appearance and will therefore understand how my line of thinking began).

As all of us know, when we look up at the stars in the night sky we are actually looking back into time. Light, after all, has a finite, measurable speed (approximately 186,000 miles per second), which allows us to measure the distance to stars based on the number of years it takes the light to reach Earth (light years). Obviously, these distances are enormous. The nearest star to Earth (other than our own sun) is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf in the constellation Centaurus, which is 4.243 light years distant. In other words, when we look up at Proxima Centauri we are seeing it as it was approximately 4 years, 89 days ago.

The farthest star (actually a cluster of stars) visible with the naked eye is 2.5 million light years away in the Andromeda galaxy. The stars within our own galaxy are generally less than 4,000 light years away. So when we look at stars in our own galaxy we can be looking almost 4000 years into the past or, in the case of Andromeda, a staggering 2.5 million years into the past.

Now let’s turn things around: imagine you are on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (even though there are no planets around this star) and you are looking back at Earth. And let’s further imagine that you have the capability to really zoom in on our planet similar to the way you can observe with Google Earth, only in even more detail. What would you see? Well, if you focused in on the United States, President Obama would have just been elected to his first term.

Or let’s assume you are on a space ship 43 light years away from Earth. If you had the technology to do so, you might look back and see me strike out the last batter in the one, and only, little league game we won that year (against the best team in the league, I would point out).

Thus, assuming that there is a technology that would allow this type of detailed viewing to take place, the light from our planet and, by extension each moment of our lives, would be visible somewhere in the universe. And because the universe is too all intents limitless and expanding, our lives will continue to shine out into space indefinitely.