Noodling Big Numbers

I was reading a science fiction book the other day. One of the characters mentioned they were going 97 times the speed of light. Something made me get a pen and paper and do some math. I got the pen and paper because a calculator only goes up to 8 digits and this was going to be a lot more than eight digits.

The speed of light is approximately 186,282 miles a second. It takes the light from the sun 8.3 minutes to get to the Earth, just to give you a frame of reference for how long things take to travel at such a speed. The average distance of the Earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles.

Because of the distance of things in the universe, the measurements are in light years. The amount of distance it takes for light to travel in a year's time. How much distance does light travel in a year? 5,878,630,000,000 miles. That's 5 trillion 878 million 630 million miles in a year. The Milky Way galaxy (our galaxy) is 100,000 light years across. So the distance across is 5,878,630,000,000,000,000 miles. I don't know, what is 4 digits beyond trillion?

The closest start is Proxima Centauri at 4.24 light years from Earth. Alpha Centauri is 4.37 light years from Earth. So Proxima is 24,925,391,000,000 miles from Earth. Almost 25 trillion miles from Earth! Alpha Centauri is 25,689,613,000,000 miles from Earth. 25.7 trillion.

So where am I going with this? The spaceship in the book was traveling 18,042,000 miles a second. So, if I got the math right, and I don't know if I did, it gets a bit crazy with numbers that big, it would take 16.5 days to get to Alpha Centauri.

That's amazing, but no planets that have ever been detected there, so really there's no point in going...

I hope someday there is a technology invented to make space travel possible. It would be really cool. In the meantime we have books and movies with spaceships with warp drive and hyper drive and atomic piles. Something has to change physics otherwise we are going to be Earth bound because of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. E=mc... Fuck you! I want a space ship!

Stupid Albert... (pout, pout, pout...)