Are you spending more time in Second Life than your so-called “first”? Linden Lab recently delivered its 2008 usage results, which peg user hours up 61% over 2007 for a grand total of nearly 400 million hours total.

That’s a lot of hours, equivalent to roughly 45,631 years.

Linden Lab lists its total residents at 16,785,351 as of this posting. Roughly half a million of those were logged-in during the last seven days alone.

What’s more, peak concurrent users — the number of people playing at the same time — increased 31% over 2007.

Land “owned” by residents saw the greatest percentile growth, soaring 82% over 2007 and totaling some 1.76 billion square meters of virtual turf. By comparison, the surface area of the earth (land and water) is around 510 million square kilometers.