Galactic Do-Over

I'm sure I'm not the only person who, as he grows older, ponders some of the decisions of his past and wishes he could go back in time to slap himself silly. I'm not going to bore you with all of the colossally poor decisions that have changed the direction of my life. If you know me at all, you can probably guess about 90% of them anyway.

Another factor of growing older is an increasing sense of mortality. A slowing metabolism or an increasing number of crow's feet can make you wish for a time portal that would allow you to not only visit the past but to do so in the person of your younger self -- with all of the memories, wisdom and life experience you currently posess, of course.

Well, this website doesn't promise you the plans for building your own time machine or to chunk you through a wormhole, but it does offer you an interesting persepective on your relative age.

Let's take me for example. I am 35.8 years old here at home on terra firma -- that's 13,090 days. But on Mercury, I am 148.7 years old, which is only slightly less than my age in days on Mercury: 223.3. On Venus, my age in days and years is even closer: 53.8 days, 58.2 years. That's right, I've lived less Venusian days than years.

I'm really happy with my Martian age of 19. I'm still young enough to have that feeling of invincibility, but I'm past that pesky puberty phase with all of its hormones and sudden emergence of hairs. It would of course mean that I broke the law earlier today as I celebrated Alabama's victory in the Cotton Bowl.

Moving to the outer planets, you really see the effect of distance from the sun.. On Pluto, I am only .144 years old. At that rate, I could live to 250 on Earth and still die of SIDS on Pluto. I wonder if I were granted Plutonian citizenship if I could argue that none of my debts are legitimate, since infants are not legally competent to sign contracts.

Category:

• Fun