While daydreaming this morning, I came across the number for the speed of light. Light travels at 186000 miles per second. The odometer on my car just rolled over to that number. Hmmm, I wondered how many hours have I spent driving that many miles. A quick division by 18 years and the miles per year have been 10,333 per year. Assuming I drove at an average speed of forty miles per hour I spent 4650 hours driving, or 193.75 days.
To put that mileage in perspective, it is equal to 7.44 times around the world. The problem as I see it is I never got further than Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Another way to put it into perspective is it is three-quarters of the way to the moon.
Think, if we could travel at the speed of light Mars is only 4 minutes away. At that rate exploring Mars may be a reasonable thing to do.
Traveling to Neptune, one of the farthermost planets in our solar system would take us about four hours. I can wrap my head around traveling at the speed of light, but I can’t fathom man-made global warming will melt all the ice on Earth. The limit to traveling that fast in a spaceship is the amount of fuel it takes to keep the engines going. I can see us finding a way to propel a ship in space because we are resourceful people. It won’t happen in this century but it could happen in the next.
What an amazing life we would have traversing the Milky Way from planet to planet on our vacations. Or, driving to a Spa in the rings of Saturn, only a seventy-minute drive away from Earth. Or driving two and a half hours to Uranus for Jet Skiing on the Methane seas. If heat is your thing, take a short two-minute and twenty-second jaunt to Venus, or a five-minute ride to Mercury, but be sure to take a bath in sunscreen before leaving.
Once we can travel that fast, the genius population on Earth will invent the products we will need to take advantage of the solar system’s recreational opportunities.
Filed under: family, Motivation, Technology | Tagged: Mars, Mercury, Milky Way, SAturn, Space Travel, Space Travel Agency, Uranus |
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