[Johnny555]

"Few" has a specific meaning when applied to something countable. 40 is not "a few" in any common use of the word.

You don't say "It took the settlers 180 days to ride a wagon across the country, but today it only takes a few hours to drive across the country" when you meant "40 hours".

If you want to use "few", you'd use a different unit like "and now it only takes a few days". Or "And you can send a signal to that star system in a few decades".

[jessaustin]

Your example sort of fell apart there. It took 180 days at some hypothetical moment in history. Now it takes a few days.

There are a few words in English the meaning of which is absolute, regardless of context. "Few" is not among those words.

[Johnny555]

Few doesn't have an absolute meaning, but it does have a consistent relative meaning.

You could take a handful of sand from a sand dune and say "I took only a few grains of sand home with me"

You could say "only a few of the thousands of visible stars are close enough to send a signal to" even if that means hundreds.

But you wouldn't say "it takes 40 light years to reach the star, so the laser can reach it in a few years". You might say "It would take 1000 years for a spaceship to reach the planet, but a laser can do it in a few years" even if a "few" meant 40.

[jessaustin]

Now you've got it! Yes, "few" in this case is 40, just as in the sand example you've given it is maybe a few hundred thousand. Just as interstellar communication might take thousands of years, the sand dune might have contained billions of grains. Context is important!

NB: The light-year is a measure of distance, not of time.

[Johnny555]

And now refer back to the original quote:

especially if those astronomers live in nearby systems, such as around Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth, or TRAPPIST-1, a star about 40 light-years away that hosts seven exoplanets, three of which are potentially habitable. If the signal is spotted from either of these nearby systems, the study finds, the same megawatt laser could be used to send a brief message in the form of pulses similar to Morse code.....“If we were to successfully close a handshake and start to communicate, we could flash a message, at a data rate of about a few hundred bits per second, which would get there in just a few years,”

And you'll see my point that you wouldn't say you can reach a star that's 40 light years away in "just a few years" when "just a few years" is 40.

Note that the starting number was 40, and the "to be compared with" number was 40. 40 is not "a few" of 40.

And yeah, I was a little sloppy in using "light years" as time.

[jessaustin]

That's not a point. You deliberately misinterpreted and continue to misinterpret the clear meaning of the text. Thanks for wasting my time.

[Johnny555]

I was pretty clear about my point in my original post, and even quoted the sentence in question.

Though it's disingenuous to reply multiple times to a HackerNews post to make a trivial point and then complain about wasted time -- you choose how to spend your time.