I'm no genius, but I think space is pretty big -- and we aren't.

Spitzer Space Telescope


So I'm flipping around on the Internets today and I came across some pictures from the Spitzer Space Telescope. It's an infrared telescope that was recently re-commissioned after being down for repairs. I was looking at the photos strictly for the "wow" factor that I get from seeing galaxies and the like; those sort of photos just blow my mind. Just the thought that there are such glories in the universe that don't give a damn about me or my little problems makes me very humble and thankful for this life. But something else got my attention, something that I had considered before and wasn't really a revelation, but it's something I wanted to share as just a reminder of our place.

Now, mind you there are galaxies and nebulae and so on much farther away than this, but this will do. One of the pictures from Spitzer was of a distant galaxy called NGC 4145, about 68 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. I've done this sort of thing before, where I ask myself just how far away is 68 million light-years? But this time I wanted to know just how long it would take us to get there using some future technology.

So here's what I did. I took the speed of light, times the number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, the number of hours in a day, and the number of days in a year. So:

~ Light Speed - 186,000 miles per second

~ Multiply by 60 = 11,160,000 miles traveled in 1 minute.

~ Multiply by 60 = 669,600,000 miles traveled in 1 hour.

~ Multiply by 24 = 16,070,400,000 miles traveled in 1 day.

~ Multiply by 365 = 5,865,696,000,000 miles traveled in 1 year. Which is also 1 "light year."

~ Multiply by 68,000,000 = 398,867,328,000,000,000,000 miles traveled in 68 million light-years.

In other words, that galaxy is almost 400 quintillion miles away from us.

Now, the fastest man made vehicles are two sun probes called Helios, their top speed is something like 150,000 mph, give or take. Now that really has more to do with the gravity of the sun and the close proximity of the probes to the sun, but okay, we still built it. But, let's look say 100 years in the future, anything more than that and you wouldn't even begin to guess what will take place. But I think we can take a decent guess at the next 100 years. Of course this is just speculation, but that's all we can go on.

Let's say in the future, we decide to send a probe to that crazy NGC 4145 galaxy. Because goddammit, we have to spend our 100 trillion dollar space budget on something! Okay the 100 trillion part is pure fantasy, but we will be sending out more probes in the future. So we work for a decade or so and build the fastest damn thing ever seen by humanity: The Hasenpfeffer 9000 space probe -- brought to you by Walmart's Hasenpfeffer stew!

The Hasenpfeffer 9000 is the finest and fastest thing that Americans can pay for and our Chinese masters can build. That baby will do a sweet 1,000,000 mph! That's right, 1 million miles per hour! So come launch day they fire that baby up and send her on her way. But, I hope you left instructions for whatever future species will be here, because here's how it will play out.

~ Our speed - 1,000,000 mph

~ Multiply by 24 - 24,000,000 miles traveled in one day.

~ Multiply by 365 - 8,760,000,000 miles traveled in one year. That's 8.7 billion miles in 1 year. That's a lot!

~ Divide 398,867,328,000,000,000,000 by 8,760,000,000 = 45,532,800,000

Result:

It would still take us over 45.5 billion years traveling at 1 million miles per hour to reach that galaxy, if the universe is even still around then.

And don't forget, even if we could travel at the incredible speed of light, which is an utterly amazing, unfathomable speed, it would still take us 68 million years to reach that wacky NGC 4145!

Even if my math is off or I skipped a step, there's no getting around just how tiny we are, and how little we mean to the rest of the universe. Humbling, ain't it?