Living in the Past

How many times have you heard someone say, "he or she's living in the past"? How many people do you know live in the past? On the surface these questions are usually figures of speech. But when you think about it the answer to the second question should be, everyone I know is living in the past.

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. Sound travels at approximately 347 meters per second. On a human level this seems instant, but if someone is standing one meter away from you everything they say takes 0.002881844380403458213 seconds to travel to your ears. When you flick on the light switch the light hits your eyes 1 / 299,792,458 of a second later. In our immediate surroundings this delay seems insignificant, but lets take it outside our immediate surroundings.

The light form the sun travels 149,668,992,000 meters, so it takes approximately 500 seconds for it to get here. So the sun could have exploded 500 seconds ago. Our world could already be destroyed and we won't know it for 500 seconds. People wonder how astronomers find new stars. Some of it is technological improvements, but some of it is that the light from a newly discovered star is just now getting here. So now that you know I'm not looney let's bring it back down to our immediate surroundings and think about just much we live in the past.

I wrote the words you are reading some time ago. The sound coming from the radio you are listening to took 0.002881844380403458213 seconds to reach your ears. Your kids started fighting 0.0057636887608069164265129682997118 seconds ago.

So, how many people do you know live in the past?