To infinite and beyond?

Nasa has found a new solar system which is only 4o lightyears away from us. How far is 40 light years away? After much reading, I think one light year is 5.88 trillion miles away. This begs the question, how is 40 lightyears away considered only? I understand that this discovery is astronomical, but really I do fail understand what all the fuss is about.

Here are a few questions that pop into my mind:

1. Are we looking for another planet to live on?
2. who would actually risk moving out of our atmosphere to explore a completely alien planet, which has no guaranteed oxygen levels
3. even if life is discovered on those planets, how do we know we will be able to communicate with us, ok before I continue, this just just feels like pandora’s box.

Can we even travel 40 light years away? the simple answer to this is, before I get into the maths is that we do not have the technology to go fast enough to reach there. Apparently it will take 700,000 years to get there with our current technology. The fastest moving vehicle (if you can call it that) which is in the works to be built is called the Solar Probe plus and that will travel at a speed of 724,000km/hr and with that it will take approximately 57 years to reach the sun, which is only 0.00001581 light years away. Wow, so by that math, I can understand the excitement felt by finding 7 earth sized planets however I cannot relate to it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being cynical, it is a huge discovery and I have often laid awake in bed wondering if there is a parallel world out there, which a girl just like me, maybe doing the exact thing as I am write now, writing in her blog as I am. The possibilities of what is out here is actually endless and as far as I can remember, I’ve always believed that there are other beings  and it didn’t seem realistic for us to be the only ones in this vast endless universe.

In the words of Mulder (from the X-files) “the truth is out there”

(Images used: google search)

Selectively Curious©