This is one of the things that has been taking up a lot of my thoughts over the past year, apart from being independently wealthy and buying a Llama.

Right then, we all read about the cosmos, light years, warp drive, a planet here and galaxy there, the Hubble telescope and Miley Cyrus. For the most part I just kind of said to myself, wow thirty light years away, ho hum. Then I read an in depth article on this:
The Voyager 1 space probe may or may not have left our solar system. There seems to be an extraordinary amount of discussion about this in various papers and Internet news sites. What is in no doubt is this; it’s long, long way away from here. A really long way. Like far. But is it? This is what I have learnt.

Voyager 1 is heading in the direction of our nearest star, not counting the sun, Proxima Centauri. It’s a mere four point three light years away. That doesn’t sound like much when you say it that way. Four point three. The craft is travelling at approximately one hundred thousand miles an hour. It will take forty thousand years to reach Proxima. Let me put that another way. 40, 000 years. That’s crazy, Douglas Adams had that right. “Space is big.” This is just to our nearest star. To get to the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, will take 30 thousand light years. A light year is very roughly 5.80,000,000,000,00 miles. So travelling at 100,000 miles an hour it will take Voyager 1 1.74E18 years to complete the journey. I have absolutely no idea what that number means, in fact I have never seen a number with a letter in the middle of it, but I think it is safe to say that it’s not walking distance. There are, give or take a few, one hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. I’ll say that again too. 100,000,000,000. That’s just in our galaxy. Or it could be 400 billion depending on what is classified as a star in your time zone or the ones we can’t see. So let’s just assume that each star is four point three light years apart. How big is the Milky Way? I hesitate to do any more multiplication in case my computer has a melt down. I looked it up. 588 quad-trillion miles. I will spare us the zeros.

Forty thousand years ago we, homo sapiens, were just leaving Africa, saying ‘fuck me it’s hot’ and learning how to club things with bits of bone. Forty thousand years, think about that. The space station travels at seventeen thousand miles an hour, the Apollo spacecraft topped out at twenty-four thousand miles an hour. Our planet rotates at one thousand and forty miles an hour and flies around our sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour. So the only thing we have that’s pretty fast is Voyager, and that will still take forty thousand years to reach our nearest star.

Carl Sagan was correct. We live insignificant lives, on an insignificant planet. Miley Cyrus is not important. Rob Ford is not important. Cristiano Ronaldo is not important. Knowledge is important. We seem to have lost the ability to learn, or wait, the one that can offer instant gratification now has the power to transform and influence. Forty thousand years. I wonder.