How Old Am I?

For me, today, the answer is one year older than I was yesterday. October 10th 2012 is the day I turn 30.

30 years, that is. Feels like a long time – it’s certainly older than I’ve ever been before. But what is a year? How long is a year?

A ‘year’ is simply the name we give to the period of time that passes between completing orbits of our Sun, riding as we are on this great big ball of rock that we call the Earth. Earth takes 365 days (366 in a leap year) to do one giant lap of our solar system, so that’s how we measure the passing of our years, but how would this change if we happened to be racing around in one of the other lanes?

Here’s how old I’d be today on each of the other planets in our solar system (and Pluto, because I’m nostalgic like that), and at the bottom is a widget you can use to see how old you’d be by now if you lived on a different world!

Mercury – 125
Mercury is closer to the Sun, and whizzes around in its orbit in just 88 of our days. That’s about a quarter of the time it takes us (0.24 of the time, to be a little more accurate), so in my 30 years of life on Earth, Mercury’s thundered through nearly 125 of them.

Venus – 49
Venus completes a lap in 225 days, which is coming up for 2/3 of our year. Totalling that up puts me just shy of 50 in Venusian years.

Earth – 30
The Gold Standard of birthday measuring – for now. It gets better from here…

Mars – 16
At 687 Earth days, Mars’s year is a bit less than twice the length of ours, which makes my Martian age about half of my Earth-measured one. Fine by me.

Jupiter – 2 1/2
Godfather of our Solar System, Jupiter makes its way around the Sun in the same time that it takes us to do 12 laps.

Saturn – 1
Since I was born, Saturn completed its first orbit at some point last year. I’ve got to admit, I do tend to dribble a lot.

Uranus – about 3 months
Uranus takes about 84 Earth years to complete one of its years, which means that since I was born it’s only completed about 35% of an orbit. Scaling that down equates to a little bit more than three months, in Earth terms.

Neptune – about 2 months
One Neptunian year takes almost 165 Earth years to complete. This means that, since 1982, it’s done only 18% of an orbit. That puts me at about 2 months old, if we scale it down to an Earth year.

Pluto – about 1 month
Yes, I know Pluto’s not really a planet, but if I can’t get a little nostalgic on my 30th birthday, then when can I? With a Plutonian year being about 248 Earth years long, it has only had time to complete about 10% of an orbit in the time it’s taken me to do 30.

But how old am I?

Check it out in the widget below! Enter your current age as a number in years, choose a planet, and hit ‘submit’.