/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16167417
True. It has kept me up on nights for my whole life. People say something is x million lightyears away as a way to say how it's unreachably far, but to me I think about how we only have to travel at the speed of light for x million years and we can actually go there, its a real place with real things, which is just mindblowing. These merging galaxies for example are 300 million lightyears away. all we have to do is travel at the speed of light for roughly the time that animals have existed on the surface of earth, and we can go there. It's an entire galaxy (or pair of galaxies). That's insane!

300 million light years is a large figure, but its crazy to think that if you just travel at light speed for the span of time in which animals on the surface of earth have existed, you can actually go there. its a short distance on cosmic timescales.