For the semi intelligent primate there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. We can barely go to the moon let alone know what's out there. Like taking one step from your front door and saying I've explored the world.
So true.
Just went to Brian Cox's cosmology/astrophysics lecture recently and it blew my mind.
Admittedly he lost me in the second half, but he essentially surmised with good evidence that the weight of the universe is 5 (electrons or neutrons I forget) per cubic meter and the universe itself is FLAT - and that even when we look up or down the thin vertical side we still can't see anywhere near the edges which is amazing. Similar to looking left and right and presuming that the earth is flat because you can't contextualise the curvature of the surface. The universe is also expanding at an accelerating rate.
Consider this:
- The Milky Way consists of some 200 billion stars, of which 20 million could very well have habitable earth-like planets.
- The nearest neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, consists of anywhere from 450 billion to one trillion stars.
- There are 170 billion observable galaxies that we can visualise from our place in the universe using our most powerful telescopes.
We really are nothing at the end of the day...
Incredible isnt it. The closest star to us is Alpha centauri 4.24 light years away. We launched voyager 1 in 1977, due to using gravitational sling shotting of saturn or jupitor it is currently travelling at 62,000 km/h or 17km per second, the fastest speed of any spacecraft. Its now just passed out of our solar system and has travelled the equivalent of 17 light hours in 39 years. If it was going to alpha Centauri, it would get there in about 80,000 years.
Now if we could reach the speeds of Hellios 2 which orbited the sun (it reached a max speed of 240,000km/r using the suns incredible gravitational pull) it would cut down travel time to 19,000 years.