Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
A new online tool allows you to input your date of birth, and see how far you have traveled around the Sun and Milky Way since you came kicking and screaming into the world. As well as this, the "Cosmic Odometer" allows you to see how much older your head is than your feet, thanks to the effects of time dilation, which is always good to know.
Thanks to a rather unintuitive fact of physics – that you feel changes in acceleration, but not constant motion – it took humans a long time to figure out that the Earth is in fact moving around the Sun, and around the center of our host galaxy, the Milky Way. Thanks to the hard work of astronomers from ancient times until now, it is a relatively simple task to calculate how far the Earth has traveled over a given timeframe (in reference to the Sun, or the center of the Milky Way).
The online tool "Cosmic Odometer" allows you to input your date of birth, and see exactly how far you have hurtled around the Sun and the Milky Way, all whilst feeling stationary. Danny DeVito, as an obvious example, has traveled about 76,595,000,000 kilometers (47,594,000,000) miles around the Sun in his 81 years on the planet. In this time, the star of Twins and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has hitched a 565,850,000,000 kilometer (351,603,000,000 mile) ride around the Milky Way, courtesy of our star's journey through it. Of course, that all depends on your frame of reference.
Relative to the cosmic microwave background, which is the closest thing cosmology has to a universal reference frame, it states that Danny DeVito has experienced about 5,000 fewer seconds of time than an observer who remained at rest in that frame, for example.
As well as telling you how far you have traveled, the website gives a few other tidbits, which are a little less sorted out, cosmologically speaking – for example, revealing how much the universe has expanded since you were born, something that astronomers are very much still trying to nail down.
In one fun calculation, it also gives an estimate of how much younger your feet are than your head. According to general relativity, time moves slower in stronger gravitational fields. The closer you are to a source of mass (in this case, the Earth) the slower time moves. Whilst this has a negligible effect, and you aren't really going to notice your feet's youthful appearance, it does rack up a little. For example, the Earth's core has been calculated to be around two and a half years younger than the surface. According to the website, Danny DeVito's head is around 475.827593 nanoseconds older than than his positively youthful troll feet.
The website offers more insights, including an approximation of how many neutrinos have passed through your body since you emerged, which is fun to know even if they pretty much never interact with normal matter.
The Cosmic Odometer can be accessed here.
