🧬 BioCounter - add fun facts since you were born

📆 2025-12-05 17:20

Ever wondered exactly how many days you've been alive? Or how many times your heart has beaten? Or how far light has traveled since the moment you were born?

I recently built a small Bash script called BioCounter, and it turns your birthday into a bundle of fun stats - mixing everyday life, biology, astronomy, and a bit of cosmic perspective. It calculates your age in days and then reveals a long list of quirky, surprising facts about your time on Earth.

Whether you're a Linux tinkerer, a shell-script enthusiast, or someone who just enjoys fascinating numbers about human existence, this tiny script is a fun one to try and maybe make a page on your own website:

⏳ BioCounter: Days Alive And Fun Stats

✨ What BioCounter Does

Give it your birthdate, and the script will:

• Calculate how many total days you've been alive
• Convert that into years, months, and days
• Show how many hours, breaths, heartbeats, blinks, and sleep you've lived through
• Reveal how many Earth rotations and lunar cycles you've experienced

It's a lightweight, dependency free script that runs on any Linux or macOS system with bash and date.

🔧 Easy to Extend - Just Add Math!

One of the best things about BioCounter is how easy it is to expand. Every fun fact is powered by simple arithmetic based on:

• seconds
• minutes
• hours
• days
• or any fixed rate (heartbeats, blinks, breaths, rotations, etc.)

If you want to add a new fact - for example, "How many cups of coffee the average person consumes in your lifetime," or "How many meters your fingernails grow" - all you need to do is:

• Decide the rate per minute/hour/day/year
• Multiply that rate by the number of days (or seconds) you've been alive
• Add a new printf line with your emoji of choice

No external libraries, no complex logic - just basic math and a one-line print statement.

The script

#!/bin/bash

# --- CONFIG ---
BIRTHDATE="1990-01-01"   # <-- change to your birthday (YYYY-MM-DD)

# --- HEADER ---
printf "Welcome to 🌟 BioCounter: Days Alive And Fun Stats!\r\n"

# --- CALCULATIONS ---
birth_seconds=$(date -d "$BIRTHDATE" +%s)
now_seconds=$(date +%s)
diff_seconds=$(( now_seconds - birth_seconds )) ## Seconds since you were born

days=$(( diff_seconds / 86400 ))
years=$(( days / 365 ))
months=$(( (days % 365) / 30 ))
days_left=$(( (days % 365) % 30 ))

# --- OUTPUT ---
printf "# 🌟 BioCounter: Days Alive And Fun Stats\n\n"

printf "You were born on: %s\r\n" "$BIRTHDATE"
printf "Days since birth: %d\r\n" "$days"
printf "You are approximately: %d years, %d months, and %d days old.\r\n" "$years" "$months" "$days_left"

printf "## Interesting facts since your birth:\r\n"

# --- FUN FACTS ---
printf "🕰️  You've lived through about %d hours.\r\n" "$((days*24))"
printf "❤️  Your heart has beaten roughly %d times (assuming ~75 bpm).\r\n" "$((diff_seconds / 60 * 75))"

# Light travelled in km
light_per_day_km=25902068371   # speed of light per day in km
light_travelled_km=$(( light_per_day_km * days ))
printf "💡  Light has traveled ~%s km since your birth.\r\n" "$light_travelled_km"

printf "🌕  You've experienced about %d lunar cycles.\r\n" "$((days / 29))"
printf "☀️  You've orbited the Sun %d times.\r\n" "$years"
printf "🌍  Earth has rotated about %d times since you were born.\r\n" "$days"
printf "😴  You’ve spent roughly %d minutes asleep (assuming 8h/day).\r\n" "$((days * 8 * 60))"
printf "👁️  Your eyes have blinked roughly %d million times (15/min).\r\n" "$((days * 24 * 60 * 15 / 1000))"

BioCounter a fun playground for creativity, curiosity, and numerical trivia.

🚶 Back to Fun Stuff