Entry #10: Space, man. · 9:21am Jun 9th, 2012
...It's fraking huge, man.
Seriously, one of the things that is very, very difficult to portray when writing anything involving Space is the truly ridiculous distances involved in anything. Let me give you a rundown of things:
This is the moon, it is the closest celestial body we have. it is, on average 384,400 kilometers away. This is a distance equivalent to nine times the circumference of the Earth, more or less. To give you an idea of how fraking huge this distance is, it would take you eight or nine years to walk this far, and only if you were some magical automaton that didn't require eating or sleeping. On a car doing 100 Km/h, this would take 160 days (and a bit).
And keep in mind that we're talking about the fraking moon, which on cosmological terms is roughly equivalent to shuffling about in your seat slightly.
Next on our list of absurd distances is this:
This is the sun, our closest star. It is 1.392.000 kilometers wide, or three times the distance between the Earth and Moon. If the Sun were the size of a soccer ball (22 cm in diameter), then the Earth would be about two milimeters wide.
It is about 149,600,000 kilometers away. If it were the size of a soccer ball, then the Earth would be 23.57 meters away. If you were on an SR-71 Blackbird traveling at it's fastest official speed (3,529.6 Km/h), it would take you 15 years to get there. It takes light, the fastest thing known to man, eight minutes to get here from the Sun. We refer to this distance as an Astronomical Unit, or AU, since kilometers are too damned small for anything inside the solar system.
Finally, we have this thing:
That thing, that fraking thing, is Eris. It is the largest dwarf planet discovered, and currently holds the title of the farthest planetary body in our solar system. How far away is it?
At its closest? 37.77 AU, or 5,650,000,000 km. Holy fraking horseapples. If you so desired to make the journey on the previously mentioned SR-71 Blackbird, it would take you 566 FRAKING YEARS. If you wanted to get there today, you'd have to have left during the Battle of Varna.
And I'm not even going outside the solar system, which on cosmological terms is roughly equivalent to one's house. No wonder SoaSE ships go into FTL for in-system travel.
And size doesn’t even include time delay. Getting to another celestial body isn’t simply a matter of pointing at it and hitting the engines.
You need to work out where it is now and more importantly where it is going to be by the time you get there.
Without FTL of some kind space travel really, really sucks.
Doubly so without a reactionless drive.
164584 And then you get to interstellar distances, where you have to factor in the fact that what you're seeing is what your destination looked like years ago.
Oh and then there's the weird time dialation you'll have to experience from both your high speed and lack of gravity so while you will age that 566 years on the SR-71 a whole lot more time will likely have gone by both back home and at your destination.
Good luck with that, and thank you Einstein.
And that is why interstellar travel is basically impossible IRL. But that's what Sci-Fi space opera is for
Seriously, space is mind-bogglingly huge, which is why "realistic" science fiction set in space is so full of shit most of the time. Really, the only author I've ever encountered who did it right was Clarke in 2001 (guy seriously did his research on that one). Gimme a soft sci-fi story with stuff like Hyperspace Drives or Giant Rail Guns That Shoot You Across Star Systems (Mass Effect has the best space travel).
random note; The Sun is really freaking pretty.