Posts Tagged ‘Whimsy’

How big is the universe?

Friday, December 16th, 2011

Sometimes we can get a sense of the immensity of the universe from mundane things. The odometer on my 10 year old car is approaching 186,000 miles. That’s about as far as light goes in a single second. It takes light about 1.5 seconds to go from the Earth to the Moon, so I haven’t even gone as far as the nearest celestial body. The solar system is small potatoes though. To get to the very nearest objects that someone using SkyView is likely to want to look at, it takes light over 4 years, over 120 million seconds. That’s a billion years of driving. I don’t think the warranty will hold out!