Interplanetary Travel

Ego Control

Ted Folkert – January 9, 2020

If you have any plans to travel around the universe soon you may want to consider some facts about distances and travel times.

Considering the vastness of the universe can be overwhelming and mind-boggling. And it can be humbling.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is said to be 100,000 light-years across, with an estimated 400 billion stars in it. 100,000 light-years would be 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 miles across. At the speed of our fastest spacecraft it would take 2 billion years to cross our galaxy.

The Andromeda galaxy, is said to be 2.5 million light-years away from Earth, and has one trillion stars. It would take 2.8 billion years to cross this galaxy and perhaps 50 billion years to reach it.

The IC1101 galaxy is said to be 1.2 billion light-years away from Earth and has 100 trillion stars, 50 times the size of the Milky Way, and would take 100 billon years to cross and perhaps more than a trillion years to reach it.

How our scientists figured all this out seems beyond conception for the unscientific mind, but this is what at least one of them tells us is the consensus of the cosmologists.

Realization of our importance in the universe as a country or a planet should provide some realization of the individual value of any one of the 8 billion of us on this tiny planet – providing ego control for all, even those with incurable narcissism.

Bon Voyage!