How far is a light year?

Within the next decade scientists believe they may find planets with atmospheres capable of sustaining life as “close” as 63 light years away.  So just exactly how far is a light year?  Pretty damn far.  Here’s the math:

5,000 years ago the Myans (and Egyptians) determined the earth completes one orbit around the sun (1 year) in 365 days 5 hrs. 48 min. and 46 seconds.
365x24x60x60=31536000
5x60x60 = 18000
48×60 = 2880
46 = 46
_____________

That’s 31,556,926 seconds in one Julian calendar year.

Light travels 186,000 miles per second.  So an interstellar body one light year away is about 5,869,588,236,000 miles away. That’s five trillion, eight hundred sixty-nine billion, five hundred eighty-eight million, two hundred thirty-six thousand.  Give or take a city block or two.

The fastest speed that can be reached by a space shuttle is 17,500 miles per hour.  At this speed it would take slightly over 38,263 earth years to travel one light year into space.   Or if someone wants to make the trip in six earth years we will need a ship that travels 111,600,000 miles per hour.  Consider that nuclear fission occurs at about 7% of the speed of light that’s much faster than our greatest source of power will ever achieve.  Of course this is all based on perspective because traveling in a space craft at these speeds would slow time compared to a stationary object on earth.  You know, that pesky relativity formula Einstein discovered.

While science fiction is cool, it’s just that….fiction.  Man will never travel 63 light years from earth in our current form.  All the more reason digital and electronic storage technologies will continue to progress as a part of human evolution.  Once the human psyche can be “digitized”, as in dumped on to a hard drive, we will not only be immortal but we may be able to travel in forms that could one day take us to these planets capable of “sustaining life”.  So in all probability the mere act of searching for such biologically hospitable planets or moons is pointless in terms of travel.  By the time we achieve a way to get there we will not even need a environment capable of sustaining life in biological form.  However such environments could sustain other life forms….. which have very little probability of ever meeting us.

So if there is other intelligent life out there it can’t get to us unless it (they) know how to fold space and time.  As depicted in the movie Dune they would need to be able to “travel throughout the universe without moving”.