One Million Waves

Earth’s oceans are about 3.8 billion years old. Ocean waves are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and the wind blowing on the surface of the water, plus occasional seismic activity. All of these features were already present when the oceans formed, so we can safely say that waves have been crashing up against the coastlines of planet earth that whole 3.8 billion years. Now, there is probably not one single place that has been a consistent beach all that time. But let’s imagine for the sake of the discussion that there is one beach that has had waves crashing on it since day one. How many waves would that have been?

Let’s do some back of the envelope math. Let’s say that a wave crashes every five minutes. That means 288 waves per day and 103,680 per year. It only takes 10 years to get to a million waves. Which is a lot of waves. Every single one forming off shore and speeding its way towards the coast line, compressing up against that formidable mass of earth, rising into the air because it has nowhere else to go, and then crashing down when it can no longer hold its ephemeral shape. How many years does it take to get to a billion waves? Ten thousand years. That’s a convenient measure, because human civilization is roughly ten thousand years old. So, one billion waves. Just for fun, let’s call that a megawave.

The next question is, how many megawaves have there been in the entire history of the ocean? The answer is 380,000. Another way of saying it is, there have been three hundred and eighty thousand billions of waves in the history of the world. Or 380 trillion.

So what does this all mean? Maybe nothing. But to me, it means that in a best case scenario, I’m going to get about 1 million waves. So next time I go to the beach I’m going to enjoy the hell out of every single one of them.