The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years

For getting the feel of the milky way, I think there's nothing that is better able to simulate it than a video game, ala Elite Dangerous. I loved to navigate its galaxy map. The size of the Milky Way, the numbers of stars and distances between them are of scale in there if I recall correctly.

I am not familiar, so I don't know, but do they assume something like 31,536,000x speed of light to make the galaxy even remotely navigable, e.g., the ability to navigate from Earth to Alpha Centauri within 4.34 seconds?

When I try to explain to someone just how big and massive our universe is I usually fall back to the Voyager 1 satellite which was launched almost 50 years ago. I like to tell people that it is traveling at an amazing 17km per second! Even at such an amazing speed it has still only just traveled approx 1 light day. At such a speed it will travel about 1 light year every 18,000 years.

Then I like to say the nearest next start is roughly 4 light years away. So even at 17km per second, or about 10.5 miles per second, it will still take approx 72,000 years for it to reach the nearest star.

That star is 4 light years away and our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across. The next galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away!!! So at the incredible speeds of one of our fastest man made objects it would take something like 45 billion years to just get to the next galaxy!

Seeing how the known universe is estimated at over 46 billion light years in size and looking back on the other numbers I wrote it quickly becomes apparent that to travel across the galaxies one would need to be able to reach unbelievably unimaginable speeds. Even the speed of light as you mention would not be even close to fast enough to get anywhere significant.

On a side tangent I was always a trekie back in the day. I know their warp drive was faster then light but now I almost want to go back and look at the math of how fast they must have been going to be going the distances they were going.

It’s not that light speed is too slow, it’s that our lives are too short. If you can solve mortality, you just hop on board your 17km/s ship, turn YouTube on (all of it), and spend a relaxing 72,000 years getting to Alpha Centauri.