Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to travel between galaxies. Our lack of understanding of the universe and its billions of stars and planets put us into a state as primitive as the first man on Earth. Our notion of time limits us to think in terms of miles per hour or second, and these units are useless when wanting to travel in space where planets and suns are light years apart. NASA has invented a unit called the Astronomical Unit (AU). One AU is defined as the mileage between the sun and planet Earth. The distance between Earth and Neptune, our farthest planet, is 30.06 AU. We can understand that equals 30.06 x 93,000,000, or another more straightforward way to express it. It is 2,795,580,000 miles (billions). The numbers have become so massive that inventing new ways to express them is necessary. The numbers become more manageable once we digest the new system of expressing distances in AU. What happens when we leave our planetary system and travel to our nearest neighbor within the Milky Way galaxy? Another system is necessary because the numbers get even larger. Scientists invented the light year, or the distance light travels in one Earth year, to handle these large numbers. Proxima Centauri b, the closest planet to Earth in another galaxy, is 4.2 light years away, or twenty-four trillion miles away. For comparison, the USA’s national debt is currently at 33.2 trillion dollars.
All these big numbers are making me crazy, but I will now get to my point. Space travel is out of reach for human beings unless we discover the missing piece of the puzzle. That got me thinking about how to move faster than the speed of light. My conclusion is we need a Time Machine.
The best guess is that man will travel to Proxima Centauri b after we pay off the national debt.
Filed under: Science, Travel | Tagged: Space travel.Speed of Light, Time Machine |
AND FOR MOST OF US AT OUR AGE “DO WE HAVE THE TIME”.