Satisfied with the Ratio

This is the last day of the year. People everywhere, who do not care whether or not they miss the winter solstice by a few days, are buying root beer and ginger ale to celebrate the end of another year. I really don't care, anymore. I think it has to do with relative age.

I recall thinking, when I was twelve or thirteen, that my father was three times as old as I was. Eleven or twelve years later, he was only twice as old as I was. I was catching up fast. I never quite made it, but I gained the whole time. That explains why I am losing interest in celebrating New Year's Eve.

The universe is . . . oh . . . about 13 or 14 billion years old. It is difficult to know, exactly, because if no one was there when you are born, you have to figure it out, all alone, later, and it is easy to miss a billion years or so. In any case, I am gaining on it. I will probably not ever get all the way, but the difference between the age of everything else and me is diminishing, as the ratio shows.

I am at the "Yeah, yeah!" stage. Once I was just 7.1428571428571428571428571428571e-11 as old as the universe, but I am gaining on it, year by year. I will not bother you with the details: you will have to trust me.

So you understand why Mari and I are not going out tonight, but will open a bottle of champagne, nibble at shrimp, perhaps a little tiramisu, and recalculate, once again, how long it will be until we almost catch up with everything else. It is just a matter of being satisfied with the ratio, and we are that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog