Light of a Billion Suns
Galaxies, we know, can have billions of stars. So how might we count them?
Author’s note: these are a few drafty paragraphs that I imagine introducing a chapter on galaxies, their scale, their awesomeness, and just maybe the ways they make me think about people. Fair warning: as opening paragraphs, they don’t actually (yet) reference galaxies.
The world population recently ticked over 8 billion people, or perhaps I should say blinked, since a new human life appears every ¼ of a second, not pausing to marvel at that giant milestone, nor at much else: our population went flying past, soaring up, up, flashing, like a bird in the sun.
8 billion is a basically incomprehensible number. Suppose you wanted to listen to each person on the planet just saying their name, so you dialed up a spotify-like playlist 8 billion tracks long. Some names are long, like Bernd Ottovordemgentschenfelde, which takes 2.6 seconds to say speaking quickly. Others are short, like Tom Short, which you can spit out in less than half a second. But let’s figure that on average everyone gets one second – one-Miss-is-sip-pi – to say their name. That’s about 4 or 5 normal syllables speaking at a normal pace, Luk-as Leis-man. Maybe for longer names you could get Twista or Eminem to say them Rap God fast: 10-12 syllables in a second. But we’ll give everyone about one second.
Ok, ready? Hit play. LǐYǔxuān. Bienvenido Santos. Amelia Johnson. Krishna Badami. Mohammed Zaher. The names wash over you. Frida Andersen. ZhāngZǐhán. After 50 minutes or so, a typical college classroom lecture, you’d reach 3000 – covering the number of lives lost in the 9/11/2001 attacks on the United States, or from Hurricane Maria. Keep listening! Jesús Rodríguez. Chinara Ibrahim. The variety is striking. Beautiful, really. Though you’d certainly notice patterns. Nearly one out of every 5 names is Chinese (and nearly half of all Han Chinese people (the majority Chinese ethnicity) share the same 19 surnames!), and close to one out of 5 is Indian. Another 20% rotates between someone from the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Russia, with only about 40% of names coming from the other 187 countries of the world. So pay attention. You only get a Samoan or St. Lucian name once every 11 hours. Talia Tuigamala (did you catch it?!). Yusuf Hamadani. After 24 hours you’ve hit 86,400 beautiful names. Mikhail Mikhailov. Serenity Williams.
To get to a million you’ll need some red bull, or some attentive dreaming, but after 11.5 non-stop days you’d get there. Keep going. After nearly a month, roughly the time it takes the moon to circle the earth, you’ll have made it through a name for each person in prison in the United States. 4.5 months, every incarcerated person in the world. A year of non-stop listening, day and night, every living, breathing second, and you’d surpass 30 million, the population of Texas or Ghana – enough time to hear the name of every person who died from Covid-19 in the first ~3 years of the pandemic. Thats a lot of names. A lot of stories that could be told. A lot of laughter, or love, or stress, or trimmed toe nails.
But you’re only a fraction of the way there! It will take you a decade and a year to get through the names of the 330 million people living in the United States. And 31 years to reach your first billion. Needless to say, without a significant boost in life expectancy, we’re not going to make it the 250 years it would take to hear all 8 billion names. Not to mention that during that time, all 8 billion people would have also passed on, to be replaced by those four babies born each second, and their babies, and their babies babies. That’s a lot of coos and doo-doos and mamas and dadas and smiles and tears and everything in between. Because while we’re counting, I should mention that one can be a pretty incomprehensible number too.