Have you ever looked up at the silent sky at midnight and wondered if someone, somewhere in the crowd of billions of stars, was thinking about us right now?
Those who have a habit of digging into space science know that NASA and other space research organizations have been making groundbreaking discoveries one after another in the past few years. Last night, I was sitting on NASA's Exoplanet Exploration website, looking at data on newly discovered planets. Thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, we are now sure that there are numerous 'exoplanets' or extrasolar planets in our galaxy.
Proxima Centauri b: Image Source
The most exciting of these is 'Proxima Centauri b' in our nearest star system. According to a paper by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), it orbits in the habitable zone of its star, meaning there is a high probability of liquid water there. In addition, in The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, I saw data on another planet named KOI-4878.01, which has an 'Earth Similarity Index' or similarity rate with Earth of about 98%!
When we read in the news or in science journals that Proxima Centauri b is only 4.2 light-years away from us, or that the planet KOI-4878.01 is 1,123 light-years away-then part of our brain subconsciously thinks, "Hey, this is close!" But the cosmic void and terrifying form of distance hidden behind this word 'light year' is bound to send a chill down the spine of any ordinary person when they sit down to calculate it.
To compare the distance with real life, I was analyzing the basic calculations of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) space flight. In scientific terms, a light year is the distance that light travels in a year. The definition is very simple, but let's go a little deeper to see how unimaginable the numbers inside it are.
The speed of light is about 3,00,000 kilometers per second. In the one second it takes you to blink your eyes, light can circle our vast earth seven and a half times in that one second! Now imagine, if an object runs at this incredible speed for a year without stopping for a second, the distance it will cover is one light year.
In terms of numbers, this distance is about 9.46 trillion kilometers (9,460,000,000,000 km). If you write it down in a notebook, you will lose track of it while putting zero after zero.
When you compare this number with our real life, the picture becomes even more terrifying. One of the fastest spacecraft ever built by humans is 'Voyager 1'. It is rushing towards space at a speed of about 17 kilometers per second or about 61 thousand kilometers per hour. If you sit on this Voyager-1 vehicle and want to travel just 1 light year, it will take you about 18 thousand years!
So how long will it take us to reach our nearest neighboring planet - Proxima Centauri b? Even if we ride on this fastest rocket of current technology, it will take about 75 thousand to 80 thousand years to reach there. The entire written history of human civilization is only 5-6 thousand years! And our current science cannot even imagine KOI-4878.01, which is 1,123 light years away.
Reading NASA databases, a strange sadness suddenly fills me. How powerful we think we are on Earth, how arrogant we are, how divided we are! Yet, how small and helpless we are in front of this cosmic vastness!
Perhaps, based on some unknown source of theoretical physics, future generations will discover wormholes or a 'warp drive' engine that travels faster than light. Perhaps, millions of years from now, humanity will really bathe in the light of another star. But until then, this small blue dot floating in the bosom of infinite darkness is our only home. We are very alone on this lonely journey.
(Note: I have collected the distances of the planets and astrophysics data mentioned in the above article from the links given in the article and arranged them in my own way. The rest of the article is purely my own thoughts and feelings about the universe.)
Note: Originally written in Bengali and translated into English using Google Translate.