The Boggled Mind

Light travels at a speed of 670,616,629 miles per hour. A spaceship travelling 100,000 miles an hour would take

5,878,499,833,750,587 miles in a light year

The closest stellar system that has a confirmed planet is Epsilon Eridani which is 10.3 light-years away. However, if you travel a little farther to 15.3 light-years away, there is a system known as Gliese 876. It has four identified planets.

The Boggled Mind

Space travel is one of Mankind’s oldest dreams, and I am one of those dreamers.

Every now and then, I let go of my mind the way a child lets go of a string-tethered balloon he has been holding, and just get lost in the awe of wondering.

I began by wondering how long it would take a spaceship traveling at 100,000 miles an hour to reach the nearest solar system to our own—Alpha Centauri, which is approximately 4.3 light-years away. (In one year, light travels roughly 5,878,499,833,750,587—that’s nearly six quadrillion—miles, if that’s any help, and traveling at 100,000 miles an hour it would take 671,000 years to cover the distance light travels in a year. Even at a million miles an hour, it would still take almost 6,000 years.)

The problem is that Alpha Centauri apparently doesn’t have any known planets. The closest solar system in which planets have been found, Epsilon Eridani, is 10.3 light years away (I’ll let you do the distance-in-miles math on that one).

I didn’t even allow myself to think of how, traveling at that speed, one could avoid colliding with what other unknown objects there may be floating around out there in space. And in the 6,000 years it would take to reach Alpha Centauri, assuming mankind on earth had not destroyed itself or met with some species-ending fate and continued the technological advances we would have made in those intervening years would probably include either even much faster spaceships than the one originally launched, or a way to bend time and space…so that when the first ship finally reached its destination destination, others of our race may well already be there waiting for us.

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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com.  I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com.