Humans are an optimistic bunch of beings. We assume that someday we will travel to the stars and beyond just like what happened in Star Trek.
The closest star to us (earth) is a star called Proxima Centauri which is one of three stars in a cluster known as Alpha Centauri. This star is 4.3 light years away. That’s 5.88 trillion miles “in one light year x 4.3 = a little over 25 trillion miles away”. A nice Sunday drive.
If, for the fun of it, there was a planet circling around this star and we wanted to go visit this planet to see if there is an atmosphere with oxygen in it, so that we may start a new civilization there, let’s see how long it would take us to get there.
First of all, the fastest space craft we have made was the New Horizons probe that went to Pluto. It’s speed got up to 106,000 mph. One light year has 5,880,000,000,000 miles in it. So if we divide 106,000 into 5,880,000,000,000, we get 55,471,698 years. If we now multiply that number by 4.3 (remember, the distance from earth to Proxima Centauri), we get a time to get to the nearest star at 238,528,301.4 years. Raise your hand if you think this is going to happen.
Even if we come up with a space ship that can travel at the speed of 500,000 mph, it would still take 47,705,661 years to get there. That’s millions.
So in the end of our calculations, we can forget about traveling to the nearest star. IT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN UNTILL WE CAN TRAVEL AT HALF THE SPEED OF LIGHT.
Paul Berkow is a member of the Open Table at www.OpenTable.fun You can join in our ongoing discussions; conversations that are truly commensurate with the spiritual, intellectual, and societal development of a great humanity. To obtain a login and password. Please use our Contributor Enrollment form.