[Nadya]

Proxima Centauri is 4ly away. New Horizons (the Pluto Probe) was travelling at 15.73km/second (just over 34,000/mph)

You're looking at closer to 75,000 years - not 1,000 years - to reach Proxima Centauri.

E:

Did actual maths. Closer to 75,000 not 100,000.

[simplemath]

This whole conversation reminds me of Europeans who have never been to the states thinking of flying over for a week, renting a car and visiting the Florida Keys, Times Square, the grand Canyon and Disneyland.

At 34k MPH it would take 75 Millenia to reach our literal stellar next door neighbor.

Makes the blood boil how vast and empty space really is, when you think about it

[Nadya]

As you mention - comprehending how large/small countries are is tough for some people. Planet-size differences even more so. Many probably don't realize how big the sun is! Then you have to comprehend that on a galactic scale - our sun is really, really tiny [0].

We exist on a tiny spec of dust; inside of a solar system that is no larger than a tiny spec of dust; inside of a galaxy that is no larger than a tiny spec of dust; inside a supercluster that is only a tiny spec of dust.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/DUzDo3k.gifv

[sevensor]

Every time I try to comprehend the sun as it actually is -- its size and composition -- I end up completely boggled and unnerved. A vast and uncaring ball of plasma, mostly hydrogen, supporting billions of years of fusion reactions, so big that the orbit of the planet I live on causes only the slightest wobble in its position; it's no wonder the ancients worshiped the sun. There's nothing about it I can begin to grasp except by analogy.

[hexagonc]

I'll just leave this here for you. . .

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Comparis...

[simplemath]

Ill just leave THIS here for you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgNDao7m41M

[sevensor]

Thanks to you, and to the GP. I do enjoy the analogies! I think the absolutely brain-crushing thing about objects of astronomic magnitude is trying to reverse the log-transform we use to make sense of them. For me it produces a sense of vertigo, like standing at the top of a cliff.

[hexagonc]

Okay. . . (humbly slinks away with tail between his legs)

[macintux]

I did some rough estimation on a map recently and decided that driving from Seattle to Miami was only slightly shorter than from Paris to China.

This is a bloody big country.

[Retric]

New Horizons is a traditional design with chemical propultion. Ion drives should hit ~5.5x that speed fairly easily. (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/144296-nasas-next-ion-dri...)

A larger issue is RTG's are not useful on a very long long timescale.

ITER style fusion is likely the best power source for such missions and should hit ~1-10% of light speed fairly easily. But, building something that large is a major issue.

On the upside, we have already gone 18.1 light hours, 4.2 light years is not an unreasonable jump.

[Nadya]

~5.5x that speed is still about 13,636~ years. Much better but still not very realistic....

18.1 lighthours is 3/4ths of 1 lightday. Which is 1/1533 of 4.2 lightyears or in other words: 0.06% of the way there. Going the remaining 99.94% is a massive jump!