Next year in November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be ONE full light day away from the Earth!
Launched in 1977, it took almost 50 Earth years to reach "just" distance of 1 light day
Space is so big and we are so tiny 
Discussion
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Discussion
@stux Voyagers 1 & 2 weren't optimized for maximum velocity, they followed the trajectories needed for their flybys. And that's not even considering what we could in principle build today (nuclear-electric). So I don't think "At Voyager's speed it would take xxx..." is really the best yardstick.
@stux That = 25,902,068,371.2 km, which is a VERY long way!
@stux reading A Deepness in the Sky, a Vernor Vinge novel. In it humans have started to colonise the galaxy but at a fraction of the speed of light, so it's no space opera, and it takes centuries to get anywhere...
Space is big...
@stux in the 1980s the most wise idea was, they'd travel in sleeper ships to encounter some Xenomorph. Because nobody managed to invent the warp. Except maybe Albert Einstein, and he meant you can't warp anything unless you are as massive as a star itself.
@stux space is big and we are so slow
@stux I follow @NSFVoyager2 . When I see a message like:
"I am currently ~19h 32m 21s of light travel time from Earth (2025:284:000000:2L)"
It gives me some much needed perspective. The account also posts about Voyager 1:
@stux I really hope the speed of light isn't a fundamentally insurmountable limit. Because if it is, this would mean the universe is a rather boring place.
@stux And you can even follow the Voyager probes on Mastodon: @NSFVoyager2
@stux luckily we have got big egos to make up for that.
@stux And in 346 years Voyager will be stranded in the Delta Quadrant, facing a 75 year journey back to Federation space.
@stux if my quick maths is correct, it will take voyager 77,380 Earth years to reach proxima centuri, our closest neighbouring star 🤯
@stux long live to voyagers :)
Incredible times when we did really good stuff without AI crap, etc.
since 70's that we stop in time and become bubblefied ...
Incredible times when we did really good stuff without AI crap, etc.
since 70's that we stop in time and become bubblefied ...
@stux
Truly remarkable. Impossible to imagine. Looking back at all the sci-fi I’ve read, every one had to come up with some ‘magic’ to get around how immense space is.
"Launched in 1977, it took almost 50 Earth years to reach "just" distance of 1 light day"
@stux It's a great big universe, and we're all really puny. We're just tiny little specks about the size of Mickey Rooney.
https://youtu.be/xTIR1B7fRLk
https://youtu.be/xTIR1B7fRLk
@stux Also: Voyager WOOOSH.
@stux It's amazing how much distance there is between objects in space. I have to think of it in graduated steps: between us and the other planets, between our solar system and other stars, between our solar system and other galaxies. It's amazing how long it takes for our galaxy to make a single rotation.
@kimlockhartga @stux
Not to mention (and this is what always stops me in my tracks) we aren't at a standstill...all moving along, dragged behind a sun that is on it's own spiraling path, in an arm of a galaxy that is also moving through space.
@stux yeah. It’s like that Douglas Adams quote: “ Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
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