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January 22, 2015
Beyond that is the Oort cloud, an astonishing 100,000 AU distant
We don’t really have much data yet on what’s out there, nor will we for some time. A spacecraft like Voyager might reach it after some thousand of years yet still be in the Solar System; it will be coasting uphill out of Sol’s gravity well for 126,000 AU before it begins to slide downhill into the gravity of Proxima Centauri. However, despite the physical insignificance of the arrival of the tiny probe in the Kuiper Belt, its little mass of computers, sensors and propulsors will in informational terms be the most complex and powerful object in the outer solar system. After billions of years this vast region will be drawn into the flow of human history, its paradisal state ended forever, permanently changed by the advent of complexity, in the shape of a human artifact, several orders of magnitude greater in information processing capability than anything in that region of rocks and ice.The Coming of the Serpent | Belmont Club
Posted by gerardvanderleun at January 22, 2015 12:20 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
The scale of galactic distances are hardly comprehensible. I read recently that if you think of the earth as the size of a single grain of sand, then how far away, to scale, would be the closest star other than the sun?
10 kilometers - more than 6 miles.
We ain't going nowhere quickly.
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at January 22, 2015 1:11 PM
I had heard the same thing except the distance was 250,000 miles rather then 6.
Something MAJOR will have to happen here if they want to get there. Clearly the old way won't work. Hell, the chinese had fire coming out of the end of pipes 1000 years ago and they're still using that methodry today. They need something brand new.
Posted by: ghostsniper at January 22, 2015 2:12 PM
Sell liberals tickets on Trip advisor. Anything sounding cool and Virgin Atlantic connected they'll buy. Make sure they go.
Posted by: Vermont Woodchuck at January 22, 2015 3:37 PM
By the time it gets there and starts sending signals back we'll be at, what, the caves and discovering fire again stage?
Perhaps all the UFOs we have been seeing are really probes sent by us some millennia ago and as they return, it is just that we forgot sending them.
Posted by: chasmatic at January 22, 2015 4:18 PM
Well, here ya go:
"If the Sun was a grain of sand, and the Earth a microscopic speck one inch away, then Jupiter would lie 5.2 inches away and Pluto an average of 40 inches away. Next stop… the nearest star, about 4.3 miles away, with mostly empty space between it and the Sun. The star Vega would be 26 miles away, the Orion Nebula 1340 miles away, and the globular cluster M15 some 25,000 miles distant (about three times the diameter of the Earth).
"And even on this massively compressed scale, the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy itself would be about 100,000 miles."
Posted by: plus.google.com/104841162830331053592 at January 22, 2015 7:58 PM
plus: I tend to think those are the actual dimensions. How big do you think we are? If we had grains of sand as big as the sun we would soon run out of room. Just the sheer weight of it all would be unsustainable. My uncle Letsgo Lozko, in addition to raising bantam chickens, did some amateur physics work. He told me if we took all the air out from between the molecules and atoms of everything we would end up with a mass as big as a cue ball except heavy.
Posted by: chasmatic at January 22, 2015 11:39 PM
Our federal judges must know how to commute to distant places in the Galaxy because the decisions they hand down from the bench demonstrate the fact that they are from other planets.
Posted by: DonRodrigo at January 23, 2015 8:43 AM
On a more serious note: something better than chemical propulsion is necessary to make even Mars "colonization" feasible.
Posted by: DonRodrigo at January 23, 2015 8:47 AM