Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Another November 5, 2013 Twitter tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson). He seems to have been on a football kick that day:
.....If a football at the 50 yd line were the Sun, how far is the Oort Cloud? // 400 mi away. Earth? The 35 yd line.
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To add some ideas of scale to that . . .
The nearest “Goldilocks” planet found to date (planets at the right distance from their sun that they could potentially support life) is 22 light years away. On the football field scale that's the Earth's Sun at the 50 yard line and the Goldilocks planet at about 8,800 miles. The Voyager 1 Spacecraft left the Solar System in August of last year about 25 years after launch.
Some ideas of the scale of distance to consider for those who dream of humans migrating to another solar system.