You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool fact of the day is that astronomers have measured all the starlight that's managed

to escape into space over the history of the universe.

And it equals about four times ten to the 84th power particles of light.

That's roughly equivalent to all the photons the sun would emit if it burned for a hundred

billion trillion years, which is a little bit longer than the five billion or so years

that has left before we really have to find a new place to live.

And the universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old.

And surprisingly, we just found evidence that blue archaeologists that you wouldn't believe,

they found tools and butchered bones 2.4 million years old.

They clearly weren't from humans. They were from some pre-proto-human.

But we've been working on getting to where we are for 2.4 million years.

And when you think on time scales like that amazing stuff happens.

And just the fact that we could measure and do the math to figure out how much light there is in the universe is insane.

Because the researchers use ten years of data from the NASA Fermi gamma-ray space telescope,

which maps the entire sky every three hours.

And when they put this stuff together, they figured out that even though the sky is dark,

it has this diffuse glow that are from photons emitted long ago from ancient dead stars.

And we call it extra galactic background light.

And I'm blown away by all this because if you ever wanted to feel inconsequential, this ought to be it.

You're right now 2.4 million years ago doing this.

And such a tiny little thing in the universe.

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