40 Years

Forty years, around 14,600 days, 350,400 hours, 21,024,000 minutes, or 1,261,440,000 seconds. In other words around 1.3 gigaseconds. That’s the amount of time that I have been married to my wife, Elizabeth, known to everyone as Matty. I don’t mean to imply that it seems a long time – it doesn’t! Far from it. But it has been a long time, and I am amazed. Firstly because it has been a long time and secondly because we have stuck together for that long.

In that time the earth has travelled 37,600 million kilometres, light from earth or the sun has travelled 40 light years, or 3.8 x 10^14 kilometres. There are around 2,000 known stars within 50 light years of earth, with 133 falling among the brightest 10%, and according to my calculations around half of them are less than 40 light years away. That means that there is little chance that any LGMs will have been blinded by the flash of the photographer’s camera.

In that time a lot has happened. We have had three children and shortly after that, moved half way around the world. The kids have grown up and we now have three grandchildren, who are also growing up fast. The youngest has been at school for a year now, and it seem only recently that her mother was just starting school herself. Thankfully the kids have not dispersed too widely and they and the grandkids will be lunching with us tomorrow to celebrate.

I’ve been looking at the things that have happened and changed in that 40 years. Strangely I had thought that the moon landings had not finished when we got married, but in fact there was no overlap. The last moon landing (Apollo 17) happened in 1972, before we were married. (The first landing was in 1969). Weird!

While men have not been to the moon in the last 40 years, many man-made devices have been sent to other planets and even to comets, The Hubble space telescope has sent back amazing photographs of the depths of space and other such telescopes have followed suit.

One of the biggest successes in exploration of the solar system has been the Mars Rover Opportunity which has operated on the surface of Mars since 2004. It’s original planned activity period was scheduled to be 90 sols or Martian days (slightly longer than an Earth day). However Opportunity is still functioning and sending back amazing photographs much more than 10 years since it landed.

Many of Opportunity’s photographs and panoramas can be found on the NASA web site, which also contains stunning photographs, both modern and historical, of rocket and shuttle launches. It also includes astronomical photographs taken by many different telescopes and photographs taken on the moon and from orbit. I highly recommend it.

Of course many important happenings occurred in the last 40 years. One of the biggest was the rise of the Internet. The birth of the networks that formed the Internet happened in the 1970s, and the term “Internet” was used in a technical document in December 1974, four months before we got married!

Most people spend a lot of time on the Internet using a browser and viewing sites and that aspect of the Internet, originally called “the World Wide Web”, originated in CERN in the late 1980s. At some time a lot later than that I downloaded a copy of the NCSA web server and create a “Hello World” web page. I then pointed a browser at it (probably an early version of Internet Explorer) and up popped my “Hello World” page! At the time I was thrilled and delighted!

Of course not all things that have happened in the last 40 years are so great. According to the WWF the Earth has lost half its wildlife. 40 years ago global warming had not become a topic of concern, although it was first mentioned by Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

Another notable event around 1975 was the first commercial flight of Concorde in 1976. It went out of service in 2003 having failed to become a commercial success. I worked for British Aerospace at one time, though not directly on anything to do with Concorde. I also worked for British Aerospace who made the Olympus engines for the Concordes.

In 1977 the Queen celebrated her celebrated her silver jubilee, and she is still going 40 years later! I don’t remember much of the celebrations but I do remember that it was a big thing at the time!

While searching around for links for this post I came across this useful link from the Sunday Telegraph which lists events from the last 50 years. It’s amazing how many seem to be fairly recent and at the same time a long time ago. The first case of AIDS was diagnosed in 1980, for example. The Vietnam war ended in 1975. The first test tube baby was born in 1978. Her son was conceived naturally and was born in 2006.

So much that we take for granted today was not around when we got married. No Internet as above. No cell phones. According to the Sunday Times list above, the first British mobile phone call was made by the comedian Ernie Wise to Vodafone. The first mobile phones were small bricks and had battery lives which were very short. They were also rare and expensive. Facebook, Twitter and all the other “Social Media” sites were well in the future and the multifunction devices that mobile phones have become were almost unimaginable.

So many things have changed that it is a wonder that anything has lasted. Our marriage has lasted, even though the concept of marriage itself has changed to include same-sex marriage, over the four decades. It seems that even same-sex marriage is becoming less popular, with couples often having children first and getting married later. That still seems odd to me, but it seems to work for many people.

We’ve made it through 40 years while all things have changed around us. I’m proud of that fact and hope that we can continue for many more. But we have a long way to go to beat my parents – they just recently celebrated 70 years of marriage.