Something to put in perspective… The closest celestial object to us in space is the Moon at around 240,000 miles away. If you were to fly around Earth ten times over the equator, that distance you covered would be the distance to the moon. Our sun, 330,000 times more massive than Earth, is the center of gravity that we have been continuously orbiting for the last 4.5 billion years. It is on average, 94 million miles away from us, about 390 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Voyager 1 has been hurtling through space at around 40,000 mph for the last 34 years, 10 months and 3 days. Do you know how little distance its travelled? It depends how you look at it, but it is only about 11 billion miles away. When the nearest star to us besides the sun is just under 24 trillion miles away, you can see how daunting of a task interstellar travel is at these “slow” speeds of 40,000 mph. At this speed however, you can make it all the way around the Equator in about 30 minutes. This 11-billion mile, 35-year journey Voyager 1 has taken; if it did that again another 2,179 times, Voyager would make it to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth that is part of the Alpha Centauri star system. It is a “close” 24 trillion miles from Earth, or 4.2 light years. I’ll go one step further and explain that the nearest galaxy to us is about 25,000 light years away. In miles thats 25,000 X 5.8 trillion. Ironically, this galaxy called Canis Major Dwarf is actually closer to our solar system than we are to the center of our own galaxy (27,000 light years away). Voyager would make it to our closest galaxy Canis Major Dwarf, in about 414 million years. I did the math in about 3 different ways and got the same answer, I couldnt believe it myself… Space is humungous. There really is no word to describe its size. Scientists believe dark energy has been fueling the expansion of the universe for the last 9 billion years or more. Lets face it, unless we want to spend thousands of years getting from one star to the next, we better find a way to manipulate gravity and space so we can do things Einstein theorized. How far away are we from the technology to create wormholes? We could be decades, if not centuries away from this unbelievable technology. We have come a long way in such a short time, but we still have much, much more to learn. We could all use a little humility to be reminded of our tiny place amongst the stars. I can tell you personally, that I am continuously humbled by the fact that we are so far away from everything. Voyager 1 is like our message in a bottle, and we are truly on our own island in the middle of the expanding cosmic sea…
Posted on: Thu, 05 Sep 2013 05:39:03 +0000
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