Here’s something to get your gears turning on a Saturday morning.
This is a fairly typical galaxy called NGC (New General Catalogue) 7331. It’s a cozy 50M light-years away. Images like this one are a great teaching tool to demonstrate the vastness of space, and just what “fifty million light-years” means.
Imagine you’re a passenger on an intergenerational city-sized starship traveling a few million miles per hour (which is theoretically possible, but it’s hell on your insurance premiums). And this glorious view is what you’re seeing through the windows.
You were born on this starship. You’ll die on this starship. Your parents and grandparents were too, as will your kids and grandkids. Your starship has been hurtling along at a few million miles per hour for CENTURIES. But one day, if all goes well, one of your descendants will set foot on a planet somewhere in that galaxy looming large.
But for all of those generations, the view ahead hasn’t changed. It looks exactly the same distance to you on this day as it did to your great-great-great-grandmother, as it will to your great-great-great-granddaughter. It never appears any closer, even though you’ve been hauling ass towards it for centuries.*
Why?
Because that pittance of time, a mere 8-10 human generations is only 200-300 years (as measured on Earth). That’s less than 1/200,000th of the way to your destination. It would take TWO MILLION human generations traveling at light-speed—which isn’t possible—to make the journey in our starship.
So expecting to wake up one day and say; “Hey, NGC7331 looks closer today. I think we’re getting there!” Nope, your view won’t change. That’s like stepping on a book to get a better look at Jupiter. Are you closer? Sure. But it’s not going to look any different. Not even if you stand on a million books.
And just in case your mind isn’t thoroughly boggled just yet, NGC 7331, at 50M light-years away, is right in the neighborhood. The farthest known observable objects are 275 TIMES farther away than that.
I know... It’s like putting your brain in an orange juicer.
?
[*HOWEVER: According to Einstein’s General Theory, if you were able to achieve a velocity *near to* the speed of light—186,282 m/second. That’s 670M mph—everything onboard the starship, including you, time would slow down relative to your point of departure (hence “relativity”). That is, Earth might have aged 50M years in the time it took for the starship to get there, but you and your fellow travelers might have only aged a few thousand years.]