How big is space? These two sites will give you a sense

The biggest challenge that humanity will face as we venture out into the universe isn't the effects of cosmic radiation or low gravity on our bodies, or the possible breakdown of whatever ships we fly on, or even potential conflict with aliens. No, the 'biggest' challenge we will face is, literally, how big space is.

Space is big. Really big.

We already have a taste of that so far. The furthest out that any man-made object has traveled is about 18.5 billion kilometres. That would be Voyager 1, and even though it's currently traveling at over 60,000 km/h, it's taken the spacecraft over 35 years to reach that distance.

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It's hard to get a sense of just how vast space really is, but people have come up with some great ways of illustrating it for us.

A good start is 'Distance to Mars':

Setting Earth at a size of 100 pixels across on your screen, it takes your browser on a trip to Mars at around 3 times the speed of light. At it's closest distance to Earth, the journey is completed in about a minute. If it performed the journey today, when Mars is roughly on the other side of the Sun from us, you'd be watching your browser for around 7 minutes before it arrived at its destination.

From there, take a look at this next one, Scale of the Universe, which will let you scroll back and forth between the smallest and largest scales of our known universe.

The vast difference between the two extreme scales is mind-boggling, and we're stuck somewhere near the middle of the two. Check out the other stuff on that site too — Powers of Ten, The Most Astounding Fact and Observable Universe — since they're really cool.

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It's doubtful we'll be making any personal journeys into the smallest scales, but the hope (at least for me) is that our discoveries will soon give us a way to explore the larger scales, like at least interstellar distances, so that we can get out there and see some of the wonders of the universe up close.

(Images courtesy: NASA/David Paliwoda and Jesse Williams/Cary and Michael Huang)

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