One could say that it is the Hubble telescope’s amazing images, the Cassini/Hyugen circling Saturn, or even the discovery of new planets around faraway stars that are responsible. Add the fact that this is The International Year of Astronomy, and it would seem obvious why people are becoming acquainted with the vastness of space. But I am referring to something much less obvious, but no less astronomical. I am talking about the numbers that are spread out in the front headlines of all of the newspapers, tv, and websites around the world.
One of these numbers is the $818 billion (818,000,000,000) stimulus package. What does a number such as this one represent? One thing for sure is that it can be described as “astronomical”. Now what does it mean to call something astronomical? First of all it means that because of its size, we just simply don’t understand it. Let me give an example:
The distance from here to the Moon is an average of 239,000 miles. This is something that we can wrap our heads around, barely– just think of going around the earth 60 times at the equator. From here to the Sun it is 93,000,000 miles. This number is already beyond our understanding; it is 389 times the distance to the Moon, or 23,340 times around the equator. From the Sun to Neptune, our most distant planet (I do agree that Pluto is not a planet, but that’s another topic) it is 2,790,000,000 miles. That number makes no sense to us humans. We are not made to understand this kind of distance; we can only try to compare them to others, which conveniently makes the numbers small. In the process, we often use the speed of light: 186,000 miles per second; but that new unit is already one we can barely understand. Even so, it conveniently translates distances into time: at the speed of light, it would take 4 hours and 10 minutes to reach Neptune.
If dollars were miles, we could go on for 51 days (at the speed of light) until we reached the amount of the stimulus package. In comparison, Voyager 1, the furthest traveling man-made object, is just over 1% of that distance, and it was launched on September 5th, 1977. We would still be four years and one month away from the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. Far enough away, but actually not so much, considering that already the government is considering buying bad loans from banks to the tune of a trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000). That would put us 62 days closer. In this department, The Treasury is way ahead of NASA- they’re reaching for the stars!
The point of this little exposé, if you are still with me, is just to try to put things in perspective. We continue to be exposed to larger and larger numbers, but do we really understand what they mean? Chances are that we don’t… when we talk of light seconds, minutes, days or years, we are just surrendering to galloping inflation. Yes, 40 years ago a New York City subway token was 25 cents; now it is about to be ten times more. 400 years ago “our” universe was 1500 miles; it is now roughly 15,000,000,000 light years, and we are now thinking that our universe is one of many. Billions of any currency used to be safely confined to one or two figures, but a trillion? Can we understand what it means to the scale of our wallet? No, we can’t.
So when you hear complaints about the $50,000,000 designated for the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), I would not pay too much attention to this, as it represents only 4 minute and 30 seconds out of a 51 day stimulus package! Or averaging less than 5/100ths of a percent.
Think about it, or don’t think about it; in the end, it’s above our heads.