Light My Fire

So several months ago, I signed up for an RSS feed from Light Cone. The premise behind it is that light (and other things) constantly emanate from the Earth into outer space. So—in theory—your birth could have effected that light ... which means your presence could have influenced everything that light reaches ... which is everything in the universe within the distance that light has traveled since you was born. In my case, that's a little over thirty-one light years. It's like that whole, "If a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can make rain in New York," only bigger.

Which brings me to the the RSS feed, which keeps track of stars within your Light Cone. The updates are usually pretty infrequent, but for the last week or so, they've been coming fast and furious because star HR4458 is 31.1 light years away from Earth. That means that sometime today, my "sphere of potential causality" will reach that star. Everything that happens there from now on could, potentially, be effected, however minutely, by me. (It works both ways too. Anything within the Light Cone could have effected me as well.) That's really fucking nerdy, but it's also freaking me out a little bit. It's also pretty cool.

Go here to learn about your own light cone and get an explanation that (hopefully) makes more sense than this one.