Captain’s Log, Supplemental

I heard a story yesterday about scientists finding an earth-like planet sitting just outside of our solar system. Scientists say it’s probably uninhabited because the planet is so close to its sun that the surface temperature is close to 2,200 degrees.

Cool, but I say don’t these scientists have any imaginations? How do we know that right now there isn’t some scientist on that hot earth-like alien planet looking at us and speculating that nothing could be living here because we’re so distant from our sun that our surface temperature averages only about 60 degrees and no one could live on a planet that cold?

The new planet is only about 25 trillion miles away – can you even get your head around that number because I can’t. I googled “trillion” and learned that it’s one million million. That’s quite a bit. and to put it in perspective so I can understand it, I put it you into television terms. So if you were to win CBS’s Survivor (where the sole survivor wins a million dollars) you’d be a millionaire. Now, if you were a really good game player and you won Survivor a million times, you’d be a trillionaire (before taxes). Of course this is impossible because if Survivor were to be played even three times a year, I think a person would be 333,333.33∞ years old before they could win the game a million times. And that’s not very likely to happen. Although in a world where aliens live on a 2,000 degree planet of molten lava, who really knows?

Now I’m wondering how long it would take the heart to beat a trillion beats. I’m not so good at math so please feel free to correct me if I go wrong here, but say a person’s heart beats at 75 beats a minute then that would be 4,500 beats per hour. There are 24 hours in a day so that’s 270,000 beats a day which I figure to be a million beats every 3.7 days so multiply that by a million and I get 3.7 million and I have no idea what that is but I’m guessing that it’s the number of something-or-other it would take for a heart to beat a trillion beats. Days? Years? I don’t know.

I never thought math was very important back when I was in school so I didn’t pay much attention. As it turned out, until today, I was pretty much right. Sure, I eliminated a lot of potentially rewarding careers because I stink at math, but I can balance my checkbook and figure baseball averages so I’m okay.

Anyway, back to that new planet they found – it’s pretty cool.

Live long and prosper.