This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
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Do you know how far a light-year is?
Don’t Google it! Just guess. Trust me, it’ll be more fun that way.
When I was a kid, for some reason I memorized the speed of light in miles per second, so let’s start there. In one second, light travels 186,000 miles.
That’s a lot! If there was a road that let you do it, driving that distance would get you around the earth more than 23 times. At an average speed of 70 miles an hour, that would take well over three and a half months without any stops.
So, to recap, that means that in one second, light travels about the distance you can drive in a car in three and a half months without stopping.
Right, ok, but the question at the top was, how far is a light-YEAR? That’s easy! It’s just 186,000 miles times the number of seconds in a year.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how many seconds are in a year off the top of my head, so I’ll have to go use a calculator real quick, and...
Oh. Okay.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year.
So that means that a light-year is 31,536,000 times 186,000.
Which gets us to 5,865,696,000,000 miles. Let’s just round up to six trillion.
But wait! That’s just one. One little light-year. You want to get to the nearest neighboring solar system? That’s Proxima Centauri (in orbit around a tightly bound pair of stars called Alpha Centauri), and it’s more than four light-years away. Or, about 24 trillion miles.
Let’s stop there for now.
We love to get all dizzy about astronomical numbers. And why wouldn’t we? They’re mind-boggling. The mind will boggle.
But I don’t think they matter as much as we tend to assume.
Consider the numbers that don’t boggle our minds anymore. The distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is just a bit less than 400 miles. 400 miles? That’s nothing! It’s an hour-long flight.
And that’s to say nothing of Zoom calls. I live in North Hollywood, and my business partner lives in Oakland. Even though we see each other in person maybe once a year, we talk every day.
But when’s the last time you did a road trip? As you drive along at about a mile a minute, do you ever look out the window at the vast expanses of undeveloped country and imagine how many houses you could build there? Or cities? Do you ever imagine what it would be like if you had to just get out and walk?
Suddenly, the mind starts to boggle a bit again.
But that takes some effort. We’re too used to our neat little technologies that let us talk to people who are thousands of miles away whenever we want. And, in a pinch, a person can get from pretty much anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world in about a day. The right kind of rocket can do it in an hour -- without even killing you!
So it seems to me an utter failure of imagination to think that the distance between the stars is so different. Future technologies, based on properties of reality we don’t yet understand, will make light-years as meaningless as miles.
Physical distance only matters insofar as it cannot be crossed or traversed. Other planets, other stars, other galaxies, these are, to us in our present frame, completely outside our reach. Any effort with our current abilities to contact or approach them are as absurd as a bacterium in Milwaulkee trying to find a way to send a message to a frozen shrub in Siberia.
But will the galaxy seem so large after we collapse the distances with our thoughts the same way we made our own world small enough for viral memes and plastic toys at Walmart made in China?
Distance doesn't matter