The passage of time is something that has scared me since I learned at 5 years old that our time on Earth was finite, and unless you believed in reincarnation, it was the only time you were ever going to get here.

A few years ago, I had a tiny brush with death. It was nothing immediate, but I had a medical condition that, if left untreated, could've resulted in me going to bed one night and never hitting the snooze button in the morning. It's something that really shakes you up, and makes you realize how precious life is, and to make every minute you have on the planet mean something.

But still, I don't want it to go by too fast, and as Aug. 13, 2008 approached, I kind of felt that way.

That's because today is a special day. Exactly 10 years ago today, I launched what would become Airlock Alpha for the very first time. It's a story I've told a million times before, even in this space, so I don't want to bore you with a history lesson. But 10 years ... that's a long time.

If you've seen "Rent," then you know one of the key songs talks about 525,600 minutes. But that is just one year. I have to sit there and multiple that by 10, which means if someone wrote a musical on Airlock Alpha, it would have to be 5,256,000 minutes. Or 3,650 days, not including leap years. Or 520 weeks. Or 120 months.

Yes, I know, enough with the numbers already, but I'm just not the kind of person that does things long-term. Really, before Airlock Alpha, the only two other things I did long term was live in the same house throughout most of my childhood (for 17 years to be exact), and breathing. That's it.

But here we are, 10 years later, and Airlock Alpha is not only still around but it's thriving. And it's been a blast.

When I started the site as Syfyman's World on Aug, 13, 1998, only like five people visited, and one of them was my dad. The others included my best friend at the time, Matt Bianco, who had started a fan site for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, as well as a friend of mine I knew through the AOL Star Trek area, Ian Cullen, who now owns Sci-Fi Pulse.

While I was still new to the Internet, I had big plans for myself. The site, which would become SyFy World after a few days, was something that would launch me into doing a full-fledged television Web site, but I wanted to go from being a novice to an expert first.

Not to pat my own back (but after 10 years, why not?) I did too good of a job. By the time I felt ready to expand into all of television, SyFy had a following, and they weren't willing to give up the site. They wrote and wrote and wrote (wow, did they write), imploring me to keep SyFy around, and you know what? I'm glad they did.

I absolutely love spending time on Airlock Alpha and our sister site Rabid Doll. Even when times when I've felt really down, I knew all I had to do was log in, and there would be a community here that I helped create that was waiting to interact with me. Of course, most of the time, it was to complain, but hey, I'll take any interaction I can get sometimes.

Airlock Alpha is hardly the oldest presence on the Internet. I mean places like TrekWeb and Dark Horizons have been around at least a year longer than us. But I'm glad that we were here as the Internet was picking up steam.

Even more fun to think about is that SyFy predates Google by almost a month. Of course, they have made billions of dollars and I have not, but still, age has to be worth something, right? We're three years older than Wikipedia. Five years older than Second Life.

When SyFy was launched, the most recent movie involving the USS Enterprise was "Star Trek: First Contact." Both "Star Trek: Voyager" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" were still on the air, as was "Earth: Final Conflict." "The X-Files" was just in its sixth season. Ronald D. Moore was just an executive producer on DS9 who would spend a lot of time on AOL chatting with fans, long before he would demonstrate his entertainment genius. And SciFi Channel was just six years old, and was still trying to find its footing.

"Stargate SG-1" had just completed its first season on Showtime, complete with boobs and cussing. Bill Clinton was president and M. Night Shyamalan was a complete unknown, as "The Sixth Sense" wouldn't be released for another year.

Doing a science-fiction site seemed like the dumbest thing to do at the time. Sure, you had Star Trek, but you didn't have much else. We would stretch the definition of sci-fi just so that we could have a number of shows to cover.

Today, however, there is so much science-fiction on, we have to pick and choose what we cover and what we don't. A decade ago, networks and studios were trying to find ways to shut sites like SyFy down. Now they invite us to sets, to meet with actors, and get on you if you don't publish something they think is newsworthy. SyFy went from a site that I had to pay for out of my own pocket to a self-sustaining enterprise where companies want to advertise on, and end up having to wait in line.

And we have thousands upon thousands of members in our Airlock Alpha family ... members that include you. Whether you visit Airlock Alpha once in a great while, or you're here multiple times a day, thank you for being here. It's an old cliche, but Airlock Alpha is absolutely nothing without its readers.

And just as important as our readers is the people who work tirelessly to make this site happen every day. That includes Bryant Griffin, who has been with us as our graphic designer since like 2001. He created the identity Airlock Alpha has today, which is recognized around the world. With him we have Nick Chase, our programmer, who has a very important job of making sure everything technical keeps running or the site will crash. He's also been working very hard to expand the reach of Airlock Alpha, especially into areas like Second Life.

Then we have Wayne Hall, who slaves at a desk at a major newspaper in Washington, D.C., but still finds time to share his passions with our readers as both the news editor and a writer. Alan Stanley Blair didn't even know English when he joined our site, and I had to teach ... wait, they speak English in Scotland? Oops, sorry about that Alan.

Then we have some great writers like Robin Brownfield who has written many a story and who makes sure we have Joss Whedon properly covered. Then there's Marx and Julie Pyle who have been with us for more than a year now on both SyFy and Rabid Doll, and I'm not sure what we did before they got here.

Dan Compora, well, he's Dr. Dan. What else is there to say? And Ed Left has been a fan of the site for a while, and we're very honored to have him contributing to us on a regular basis.

And there have been a lot of names from our past as well, most especially Greg Boubel, who ran Star Trek Portal, which we merged with several years ago. Then there's Christian Hohne Sparboth, the founder of TrekToday, who gave SyFy a boost in our very early days by helping us move off GeoCities and unto the Trek Nation network.

I'm just going to really start dropping names now! Other people who were bigger influences than they may realize include Eugene W. Roddenberry, Michael Ausiello, my "Earth: Final Conflict" source who even 10 years later is still unnamed, Steve Krutzler, Garth Franklin, David Gerrold, Erik Jendresen, Ron Moore, hell, I'll even add Daniel Malen to the list. Why not.

And there's been hundreds of people beyond even them ... those are just the names that come to mind at the moment. Thank all of you, because every single one of you deserve some kind of mention.

More than 20,000 stories have been posted on Airlock Alpha the last 10 years. That's a lot of stories ... and guess what? We have at least 20,000 more on their way over the next 10 years. Hopefully we'll all get together again on Aug. 13, 2018 and celebrate the 20th anniversary of Airlock Alpha, when I am 42, Madonna is 60, and Google still a month younger than us.

Don't forget to listen tonight to SyFy Radio beginning at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT as we continue to celebrate Airlock Alpha's 10th anniversary. We'll talk to many of our staff members who have been with us over the years, and I'll share some stories that I've never shared before about set visits, interactions with celebrities, and some funny moments if I can remember it (most of the last 10 years have been in a drunken haze).

I'll even talk about my first battle with another Web site ... well, maybe. I'll think about it, since it wasn't really that significant of a battle. But it could be fun.

So tune in at www.SyFyRadio.com tonight at 10 p.m. to join the fun. And if you're reading this after the fact, still click the link and listen, because we'll have an archive version of the show for you there.

Also, we'll be giving away the entire DVD series of "Masters of Science-Fiction," including two never-before-seen episodes. And we'll also randomly choose two categories from the SyFy Genre Awards, and tell you who the winners are of those two categories, more than a week before we release the results of our voting, which brought in some 50,000 ballots.

Thanks again for the last 10 years, and now it's time to do it all over again.

Michael Hinman is the founder of Airlock Alpha, writing out of Tampa, Fla. He can be reached at mhinman@airlockalpha.com.