Happy Billionth Second

Throw the Party of a Lifetime

Spoiler alert: If you were born in 1987, the time is near.

What’s a birthday? It’s a revolution around the sun. It’s a historical way to mark time that is deeply ingrained in our culture. Birthdays are also very easy to track.

Before the rise of information technology, it would not have made sense to aggregate seconds. Who on Earth could keep track of seconds except for maybe Gauss in his spare time?

It would also have been difficult to track days. If days sounds doable, estimate how many days you have been alive right now. (As a mental math practitioner, even I refrain from multiplying two digit by three digit numbers with fractional components.)

More exotic units like miles traveled through space were once speculative. Now it’s a matter of deciding whether the frame of reference should be the Sun, the center of the Milky Way, or the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

With an abundance of units at our disposal, a new question surfaces. Besides a revolution around the sun, what is our most significant milestone? Is there a milestone worthy of celebration that happens once in a lifetime?

I am partial towards seconds. The subdivision of seconds feels atomic, and its aggregates are often unnecessary. Seconds are akin to the heartbeat, a natural pulse of time. Seconds are a universal way to mark time going forward.

A standard survey of human seconds reveals one of two perspectives. The first is that a billion seconds is on the way. The second is that a billion seconds has passed.

One billion seconds arrives at approximately 31.7 years.

If that number sounds insignificant, perhaps you are conditioned to viewing time through the lens of years. One billion seconds is a beautiful number, arguably the most significant marker of all.

When does the prime of life start? One could argue that it starts at one billion seconds. With the twenties long gone and the ominous three-oh behind, confidence, youth, intelligence and professionalism converge.

If we divide the human lifespan into thirds, the middle third is where we peak. That interval starts at around a billion seconds.

A million seconds comes after eleven days. It’s so fast everybody misses it. A trillion seconds needs a utopia for humans to outlive civilizations. By 31,688 years.

One hundred million seconds has a nice ring to it. Try convincing a three-year old.

In other words, if you are tracking seconds, one billion is the only one that counts.

A birthday happens every year, and that’s amazing. A billion seconds happens once in a lifetime, and at a prime age. Turning one billion seconds is not a reason to throw a party. Turning one billion seconds is the reason to throw the party of a lifetime.

Corey J Wade is the Lead Developer and Cofounder of YourClock, an iOS app that reimagines time with one hundred plus clocks from flicks to fortnights to photons. Although his billionth second has passed, his app finds cool dates that give excuses to party every day. (7,000 years on HD 1199733 b anyone?)