Eight Minutes Left

Now. A light wave just left the sun and it will hit earth in 8 minutes.

You have eight minutes of light left. It’s all based on that space-time stuff and how light moves at a constant speed and how standard candles based on Cepheid stars helped build a cosmic distance calendar.

You know all this shit already? Then maybe don’t bother reading Frank Wilczek’s new book “Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality”.

If you don’t know any of this stuff, suffice to say that the time it takes light to travel in a year is how astronomers measure distance. And based on that, the sun is eight minutes away. Which is about as much as you need to know about astrophysics to read the rest of this blog post if you’re just a dumb stock trader like I am.

You see, you might think you have eight minutes of light left. At least. But what you don’t know is what happened 10 seconds before. Maybe the 7:50 light wave never took off. We’re not even talking about the futuristic 8:01 light wave. So even though science gave you all of these measurements and all of this knowledge; and even Annie promised “the sun’ll come up, tomorrow”, you don’t know.

Yet, you invest, thinking you know. Thinking you have so many minutes until you reach retirement. Thinking the market always, eventually, goes back up. But when? What if it’s 2008; or March 2020 right when [fill in the money sucking blank].

Anyone concerned about their financial future, has to plan like they don’t know how much time they have left before the lights go out. You can bet your bottom dollar on that.