![]() ![]() If we wanted to actually travel there in a standard space shuttle, it would take around 165,000 years. Bear in mind, that’s only the speed of an unmanned probe. So to give you an example: if we don’t invent a spaceship which travels at the speed of light and just go with what we have now – it would take around 54,000 years to reach this star. Most of outer space is empty blackness and it takes a long time to get across it. Unfortunately, such technology doesn’t exist yet.Įven though Alpha Centauri is in our own Milky Way galaxy, the space between us and this star is humongous. This means that if somehow we invented a spaceship that could travel at the speed of light, we could reach this star in four years. I mentioned it was four light years away. Then there’s other people who saw it in 1582, 1689, 17 and all these people went blue in the face trying to convince other people that Alpha Centauri was a real thing that existed. There’s evidence it was first spotted sometime between the years 100 and 170. Anyway, the star that’s four light years away is called Alpha Centauri and there’s some debate as to when it was first discovered. Because all suns are stars but not all stars are suns. It’s the closest star to Earth aside from our own Sun, which is also a star. ![]() We can still try our best to wrap our minds around the cosmos without ever actually being physically there.Ĥ.3 light years from Earth, there’s a star. ![]() And in this day and age, the number of kids wishing to chase this dream doesn’t seem to be all that large.īut not all hope is lost. Aside from Richard Branson, Elon Musk and other obscenely rich white dudes, the only people that continue to shake off their planet-based worries will be trained astronauts. It’s an absolute misfortune of modern technology that very few of us will have this stunning experience in our lifetimes. To realise that we’re all simply floating on a big wet rock in a vast expanse of nothingness is a shattering thought that can’t be matched. That is, if we’re being honest here, probably not an even trade. In return, you are suddenly overwhelmed with the monumental size of the universe. Imagine what this does to a person: in a shocking instant, you completely reset your internal earthly compass and wash away a slew of things you thought you needed to worry about. When you looking at our tiny blue planet from above, all basic human concerns evaporate. Every astronaut that has ever ventured into Earth’s low orbit or the surface of the Moon has returned to say the exact same thing: Nothing else matters when you’re up there. This is a deeply powerful reality that we somehow take for granted. Try as we might, we find it almost impossible to stop staring into the void of humanity’s many, many mistakes and/or our latest gas bill to consider the possibilities of not only our planet, but the solar system and galaxy around it. ![]()
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