My Little Universe

A friend recently said something very interesting to me…”Seems like sometimes people forget they live on a planet called Earth!” It’s very true. My universe is from my house to my office which is about 36 miles and in reality my universe is actually my house…my car,… my office. It’s whatever is in visual range of me. Every once in a while, in an act of humility I ponder on the vastness of the universe and that’s what I am going to share with you today. You think you’re the center of your little world, well sit back and ponder with me…, you’re nothing but a spec!

So, on a daily basis I drive from my house in Fort Worth to my office in Dallas (I know,…I should really move) which is 36 miles and I average about 48 mph so it takes me about 45 minutes to get there…on a good day.

The furthest I’ve been is Japan which is 6,427 miles. With the help of the jet stream and the spin of the Earth we made it back in about 10.5 hours. That’s an average speed of about 600 mph. Now that’s only ¼ of the way around the Earth and it took half a day to get there.

The furthest a human has gone is the moon which is on average 150,000 miles from Earth. The Apollo 11 astronauts were able to get there in 3 days, 3 hours, and 49 minutes, that’s an average speed of 1,974 mph.

That spec between the rings on the right is Earth as viewed from Saturn.

Launched on August 20, 1977, Voyager 1 is the furthest man-made object from Earth. It is approximately 9.6 Billion miles from Earth travelling at a speed of about 38,219 mph (~10 miles per second). After 31 years it is leaving the solar system.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the speeds humans can achieve will be insufficient for exploring our galaxy, not to even mention the universe. So let’s assume we can go as fast as possible, which is the speed of light. Now, it’s impossible to actually go this speed but let’s say we can get close enough. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second (mps). At this speed I could have reached Japan in 0.03 seconds. Apollo 11 could have made it to the moon in 1.5 seconds. Voyager 1 could have reached its current position in about 14 hours. Even at this speed it will take 4.2 years to reach the next nearest star. You starting to get the idea…?

At “astronomical” distances we start using a term of measurement called a light year. This is the distance that light can travel in one year or about 6 trillion miles. So the center of our galaxy is about 25,000 light years meaning that it would take us 25,000 years to get there at the speed of light. It would take 2.5 million years to reach the closest galaxy like ours, the Andromeda galaxy. To get to the edge of the visible universe (not the edge of the universe…the universe has no edge), all of the universe we can see, it would take about 13.7 Billion years (the present age of the universe). The universe is thought to be at least 156 Billion light years wide meaning that it would take at least 11 times the age of the universe to go all the way across it at the maximum speed you can go. Tell me that doesn’t make you feel small!

This is a picture taken by the Hubble which shows about 10,000 galaxies (that's right, those dots are galaxies, not stars), the furthest of which is about 13 billion light years away. Since it took the about 13 Billion years for the light from these galaxies to reach us this shows the universe the way it was about 800,000 years after the big bang!