i’ve been surfing through a couple of sites that’ve dropped off my radar since i went on vacation (you’re gone a week real time but in internet time it’s like a month) and apparently november 5th was the day that the voyager probe reached 90AU away from earth. if you don’t remember what voyager is, it’s the thing in star trek 1 which comes back from the robot world destroying everything in its path to reach its creator on earth.
90 astronomical units doesn’t really paint a picture of how far voyager has gone, so many people have put it into perspective:
- one AU is 149,598,000 kilometers, meaning voyager has travelled 13,463,820,000 kilometers so far.
- 1 AU is 499.005212 light seconds, meaning a ray of light can travel the same distance as voyager in 12.4751303 hours! that also means, one way communication takes 12.5 hours.
- if the galaxy was 100km wider, the nearest star would be 3-4 meters away, and voyager would only be 1.5 millimeters away!
voyager was launched on september 5th 1977. so it’s taken over 25 years to leave our solar system! if anyone has any aspirations to colonize alien worlds, i don’t think it’s gonna happen anytime soon. it’s best to realign your goals and be like nsync’s lance bass.
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