How long would it take us to travel 4,150 light years? It’s a trick question because at this stage in human development, it would take us forever. We humans can not even travel one light year, as far as public knowledge of our existing technology goes. One light year is about 5.88 trillion miles. The farthest humans have gone, if you believe it, is about 238,855 miles to the moon. As of today in the year 2024, we can’t even go to the moon any more due to … various reasons, but we are now setting our sites on Mars, which is about 33.9 million miles. We can’t do it yet, however. So, 4,150 light years, the average distance between stars in the universe (see below) is far enough to keep most species from contacting each other, unless they are much more advanced that we currently are.
… This afternoon, NASA made an announcement: Astronomers, using data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, have developed a new way to understand the most ancient light of the universe. And: all the light. Or, as NASA sums it up, appropriately pragmatically and appropriately poetically: “the total amount of light from all of the stars that have ever shone.”That light — photons from primordial stars, formed some 400 million years after the big bang — is still extant in the universe. It is more commonly known as extragalactic background light, or EBL — which is an accumulation of all the radiation in the universe ……. The average stellar density in the cosmos, they estimate, is about 1.4 stars per 100 billion cubic light years. Which means that the average distance between stars in the universe is about 4,150 light years. …
Read more: Astronomers Read the Shadows of the Universe’s Earliest Stars – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.
There is plenty of space, some would say too much. The fastest human spacecraft so far travels at 213,200 mph. (See NASA just smashed the record for the fastest human-made object — its $1.5 billion solar probe is flying past the sun at up to 213,200 mph. – Nov 5, 2018) It will be slowed down, of course, as it leaves the solar system, but for the sake of argument, let’s use that as our top speed.
A light year is 5.88 trillion miles. (5.88 x 1012 mi), so the average distance (4,150 light years) to one star from another is … way darn far.
If I’m doing the math right it would take a rather disappointing average of over 13 million years for any one alien civilization to reach another, at current top human spacecraft speed. (13,065,743 years).
Do you have anything you’d like to say to some space aliens 13 million years in our future?
Even if aliens beat our top speed by 10 times, reaching 2.2 million miles per hour, the UFOs we see today could still have been traveling for over a million of years to reach us. (1,266,189 years at 2.2 million MPH to travel 4,150 light years.) Their original mission may have changed significantly since they left their home planet and they may look noting at all like their ancestors after so many generations.
They are also probably hungry and thirsty, so treat them well.
