we are all bugs (part 1)

ok, i'm going to let you follow me through this. this is my stream of consciousness, and it is turbulent. just in case it doesn't work, you'll see the work i went through...

1. i look up the circumference of the earth at it's largest (it spins, so there is centripetal force; therefore, at the equator):
   
   24,901.55 miles



2. i divide this by 2 (since the furthest you can SEE is halfway round the world, and i convert this into millimeters for ease of use (i hate metric but (1) i don't know if americans can REALLY fathom anything smaller than an inch and (2) metric makes so much more sense... it's decimals kids!!!


20,037,580,000 millimeters (that's 20 BILLION, 37 MILLION, 580 THOUSAND, 000 millimeters

or 210,367,873.2267 flaccid penises for you curious folk out there (courtesy of weirdconverter.com


3. i look up the average size of a virus [rhinovirus in this case (the common cold)]:
   
   from the best i can tell it is 20 nanometers, so we'll go with .00002mm for arguments' sake.



4. then i search for the distance to the nearest star:
   
   4.37 light years (converted that is 4.134251x10^19mm or 9,804,959,294,158 marathons...that's for my web-buddy, Rich|Championable (though he may not want to be associated with me anymore)



5. now i find the average height of a human being:
   
   1650mm seems to be the average for humans, globally, both male and female, from the 5 seconds of google.com data i scoured through.

so, from that exercise, we've determined that:

1. dividing 2 by 3, we get that the farthest away one cold virus can be from another is 1,001,879,000,000,000 units



2. dividing 4 by 5, we see that the we are in proximity to the nearest STAR by
   
   25,056,066,666,666,666 units

that's only 25 to 1.

AND that is slightly intoxicated math. could be worse or better. what i'm saying is, is that we're not so far away from the stars as we think. if i went into how far away the nucleus (neutrons/electrons) is from the electrons, my numbers would blow your mind. we are a big world, and a monstrously huge universe... but it's all scale, and scale can be reduced to relativity. we aren't so far away from anything we might strive for. don't let anything convince you otherwise...

and TOMORROW, i'll tell you why we are bugs. you might think it is depressing... but really, if you THINK about it, it's so amazingly hopeful. i can't wait but since i got distracted by math (i'm not a normal man, they go home, sleep, drink, take a lady back and make love, watch SportsCenter), i'll have to do it later. maybe i'll do atomic relations tomorrow. thinking of that... i'll probably be single forever. now THAT is an awful thought, though rigorously proven.

thanks for tuning in.