DISTANCE

THis is just mind boggling, from ‘One Light-Day Away: Time incomprehensible.” Voyager is moving at close to 60,000 kilometers per hour, which is genuinely extraordinary by any human engineering standard. At that speed it still took nearly half a century to cover a single light-day. The nearest star is about four light-years away. Do the math: at Voyager’s pace, reaching Alpha Centauri would take something on the order of 70,000 years! We built the first stone monuments about 6,000 years ago. Midterm elections are in two months, and then it’s two more years of who knows what? Also from this post, “If the galaxy were the continental United States, one light-day would be about the width of a parking space.”