There are more atoms of gold in your body than seconds that have passed since the beginning of the universe. (6.11 * 1017 vs. 4.354 * 1017 (that’s 611,000,000,000,000,000 vs. 435,400,000,000,000,000)). And what does this mean?
Well, nothing really.
I’m just trying to convey the awesome scale of the universe, both space and time, with some familiar terms. Warning: the links in the last sentence are pretty mind-blowing.
I’ll post soon on the scaling of space and time within the realm of biology, and how the space an organism takes up in space plays a role in the space an organism takes up in time (or, Lifetime vs. Body Size)
p.s. to calculate the atoms of gold from the wiki article: (2e-7 kg) * (1000 g / 1 kg) * (1 mol Au / 196.96 g) * (6.0223 atoms Au / mol Au) (who said we would never need high school chemistry again?)
Vincent Cannataro, Ph.D. 