Quite a few years ago now, during the downtime on a work trip, one of my colleagues jokingly obtained the domain and howoldis.space and we generated a website to answer that very question: Just how old is space, exactly?

In May of 2015, a trio of us from Case arrived in New York City, ready to strut our stuff for Tech Crunch Disrupt NY. After an 8 hour bus ride, we arrived to find that the AirBnB we were supposed to stay in for the next five nights had fallen through and we had no place to stay. The three of us were able to get ourselves a hotel room for the night until we could find an AirBnB (… the startup was still bootstrapped at this point and five nights of hotel for 3 people wasn’t exactly in the budget).

We checked into the room, dropped off all our stuff, and then made our way to the nearby Irish pub. We walked in, asked for a table for three, were seated, ordered some pints of Guinness, and it was at that point that we realized there was a strange atmosphere in the air.

It was May 2nd, 2015, 6:43pm, and the Kentucky Derby was about to start. Our waiter had our beers and he almost slid into the table as he rushed over, thunk thunk thunked our beers in front of us and sprinted up close to one of the TVs around the bar, just as the race began. American Pharoah won the race.

That was the story of how we accidentally watched the Kentucky Derby. A memorable experience, to be sure, but the reason I tell it is that, if my memory serves (and it very well might not…), it brought to mind the new TLDs that were added just a few months before as a topic of conversation. In particular, the then-new .horse TLD came to mind for obvious reasons. We talked and joked about potential applications for other TLDs; the conversation probably drifted. Eventually we found our way back to the hotel room to turn in.

I don’t remember how it happened or why, but a couple months beforehand, my colleague Alex had decided to register the domain name howoldis.space (in addition to at least one other jokey domain name acquisition). I think the events from earlier spurred Alex to add more content (there was a placeholder up that just said “stay stuned”), and he generated the page basically as you see it now here on howoldis.space/oldindex.html.

Some time later, Alex did the sensible thing and let the domain’s registration lapse so he wouldn’t have to spend more money on a joke.

Maybe I’m sentimental about stuff like that, but I wanted to keep some of the camaraderie of that evening alive so I immediately snapped up the domain, forked the repository, and kept it alive.

The recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope reminded me that I had this long-running gag that only 3 people were in on. I decided to give it a bit of an update. At first, I was just going to update the image to one from JWT, but then I got the urge to explain to anyone who might stumble upon it how old the universe is and how we know.

I guess as a sort of exercise in designing a website whose entire purpose is to explain a single fact: the age of the universe. Maybe somebody will learn something?