The 600 Trillion Mile Perspective

What's better than "you are made of star stuff"? How about "you are made of cosmic information"?

At times of life trauma, anxiety, or wrenching change, it’s helpful to take a big step back and think: “Where do I want to be going?” Have I chosen the right destination? How can I get there? (It’s a useful strategy for regrouping after relationship trouble, a career setback, or a disturbing election outcome, for instance.)

In that search for mental perspective, I find it effective to be somewhat literal and to think about the situation in terms of physical perspective. It turns out that the “information ripple” concept that I talked about in an earlier column is great for doing just that.

Recapping briefly: When you look up at the sky on a clear night, every sparkle of light you see is a blip of information coming to you from afar. The location of the star, the brightness of the star—all of that is information. Starlight is full of information, starting with the most basic information of all: The star is telling you, “I exist.”

The idea is just as valid for you as it is for a star. Every influence you have on the universe—the reflection of light off your skin, the air currents you stir as you breathe, even the gravitational pull of your mass—is information that ripples continuously way from you. It spreads outward in all directions from the moment you are born, traveling at the speed of light, making it more of an information bubble than a ripple.

Your information bubble is your legacy. It is you telling the universe, “I exist.”

However many years old you are, that is how many light years away your information bubble has spread. If you live to be 100—why not be optimistic?—your ripple will have traveled 100 light years, or 600 trillion miles, by the time you die. That’s 1 quadrillion kilometers for the metric folks out there.

Try to picture that information bubble and think about it in totality. What should your overall imprint on the universe look like? Whatever happens to you today will add only a tiny bump onto your lifetime bubble (16 billion miles on the 600 trillion whole), but the shape of that bump could completely reshape of the rest of the bubble that follows.

Likewise, whatever wonderful or horrible thing happens in the world today will add a tiny bump onto the global information bubble. What matters is the overall shape.

Celestial Signposts of Your Life

A big problem with all this cosmic philosophizing is that it can get fiercely abstract. It’s hard enough to visualize the distance to the Moon. Trying to visualize a 600-trillion-mile-wide space bubble requires a serious effort of imagination. It’s not the kind thing that any of us experiences in ordinary life.

So here’s a way to help make your information bubble seem more physically concrete, and take a fun journey into deep space at the same time. We know enough about our celestial neighborhood that we can meaningfully trace the path of a life, expressed as expanding information traveling through space.

At each stage of your life, in other words, it’s easy to chart where the outer limit of your information bubble is located in space.

• At birth, your information bubble starts heading outward at light speed. It blows by the International Space Station in about 1/1000^th of a second. It passes the Moon a little over a second later.

• At 4 hours, your bubble passes Neptune, the most distant planet.

• At 1 day, your bubble flies past Voyager 1, the most distant object built by humans.

• At 1 month, you enter the Oort Cloud, the extremely loose cluster of dormant comets that surrounds the Sun. This is the outermost part of the solar system.

Now your information bubble has reached into the vast void between stars, where space is a lot more empty. At this point, jump from notable object to object takes years. Sit back, relax, live your life.

• At 4 years, your information bubble reaches Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system. Alpha Centauri contains two sunlike stars along with a tiny third star, Proxima Centauri, which has an Earth-size planet orbiting at a distance where liquid water could exist.

To keep the list manageable, I won’t go over every start and planet from here on out and will just focus on some decadal highlights. 

• At 10 years, you reach Epsilon Eridani, a nearby solitary star that is similar to the Sun in mass and brightness, though quite a bit younger. It has at least one giant planet.

• At 20 years, you pass Delta Pavonis, a near-clone of the Sun but a couple billion years older. If it has a planet with life (still a wide-open question), the beings there have quite a head-start on us.

• At 30 years, you fly by Argelander’s Star, one of the fastest-moving stars in our neighborhood. It originated in the galactic halo, the outer zone of our galaxy, and is just passing by.

• At 40 years, you are approaching Capella, one of the brightest lights in the northern sky. Capella actually a foursome: a yellow giant star orbiting an orange giant, with two smaller companion stars.

• At 50 years, you are approaching Castor, one of the two bright stars making up the “twins” in the constellation Gemini. Castor is an unusual six-star system.

• At age 65, your information bubble can retire to Aldebaran, the bright red giant star that marks the eye of Taurus the bull.

• At 80, you reach Alioth, the brightest of the stars that form the Big Dipper. Most of the prominent star patterns in the sky are chance alignments, but the members of the Dipper are actually located fairly close to each other in space.

• At 100, your information bubble sweeps past Alkaid, the end of the handle of the Big Dipper. It is a bright blue star, 600 times as bright as the Sun. Alkaid is destined to burn hard and die young.

A Cosmic Butterfly Effect

After age 100, you might have used up your time here on Earth, but your information bubble has no such mortal limits. Wait another 25 million years and it will reach the vicinity of M51, the famous Whirlpool Galaxy. What kind of life will exist on Earth by then? That answer lies far beyond any scientific forecasting.

And then your information bubble just keeps going, continuing to expand outward as long as there is space to expand into. It is your legacy to the world, and to the universe.

For sure, your information bubble is just one of 8 billion human information bubbles currently rippling outward from Earth, mingling with those of the 100 billion or so who have come before us. It’s a tiny part of a much great whole. And yet…

Your tiny influence on that global bubble keeps growing and growing, expanding at light speed. Your influences on the peope around you, and on the people who come after you, keep growing and growing as well. You are participating in butterfly effect, blown up to astronomical scales.

There is no way you can reshape that entire bubble all once, so focus on one thing you can change, rather than worrying about the million things you cannot.

If you ever wake up wondering, “What the hell should I do with today?”—something that’s happened to me once or twice—try starting small. If you want to shape your information bubble a little for the better, all you have to do is take action. Every effect starts with a cause. Concentrate on that place where you can make a positive change, on any scale. Then take the action and reshape your bubble.

This evening you can look up at Capella (bright yellowish star rising in the northeast, 40 light years away) or at Deneb (bright white star setting in the northwest, 1,500 light years away) and get a flash of cosmic perspective. It doesn’t require a telescope or fancy stargazing trip. These stars are easily visible even in urban skies. You can find them with about 60 seconds of looking around (here’s a helpful chart). As a bonus, you get brilliant Venus in the southwest and almost-as-brilliant Jupiter in the east.

No matter what you do today, big or small, its information will eventually ripple past all them, expanding exponentially. What will that information say about you and who you are, what you choose to do? That is entirely up to you.