Happy Hour - #001

 May we present, a conversation starter for your next social event:

In the words of Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame):

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Nearly 50 years ago we humans here on Earth launched what would become our best demonstration of exactly how true that is.

In 1977 Voyager 1 set out on its mission to Jupiter and Saturn, before continuing deeper into the solar system and beyond. It’s now out there in interstellar space, covering over 10 miles each second, and after a million more years at that pace (imagine how quickly you could get to the chemist at 10 miles per second), it will be roughly here in our galaxy:

10,000 centuries at 10 miles a second.

Of course, even examples like that don’t really help us grasp just how “mind-boggling” big our own galaxy is, let alone the universe at large.

Our point for this week is that there’s a near infinite amount of stuff out there, anything we could want and as much of it as we could want, but at our current level of tech it would take a really long time to get to it.

We’ll get to it eventually (if someone doesn’t get to us first), but it must begin with the initial steps we take here, now, today.

And so we ask:

How “vital” to our future human existence is what we’re doing in space in the present?