Growing up, I was always inspired by movies like Star Trek and Star Wars to think of other planets and the possibility of traveling in space. In the last few weeks we have discussed the scale of the universe, and how difficult it would be for us to travel to other regions of our nearby Universe. Currently, the fastest rocket we have created can travel about 16 kilometers per second. If we were to assume that in the near future we were able to more than triple this speed to a rate of 50 kilometers per second, how long would it take for us to reach the nearest neighboring star Proxima Centauri which is roughly 4 light years away? A light year is about 10 trillion kilometers, so this would take our hypothetical rocket around 25,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. The nearest galaxy is Andromeda, which is about 2.5 million light years away. This helps put into perspective how far our galactic neighbors really are from us, and just how many generations/years it would take to reach them even if we were to achieve light speed.
Given this perspective, the significance of our planet and solar system is given more light. Without an insane technological breakthrough, we will not be exploring the universe anytime soon. We are stuck with what we have here on Earth and on the planets around us. While the escapist fantasy of fleeing our problems here on Earth by going to another fruitful solar system that’s ideal for colonization seems like a great idea, it is really in the end just a fantasy.
A web page to explore the Universe and that provides more perspective!
Cosmology and Colin 