Three Light-Years! That’s how far the Hello From Earth message has traveled since being transmitted from a giant NASA antenna in Australia to the exoplanet Gliese 581d exactly three years ago today. As of 7 PM California time tonight (12 PM Sydney time on Tuesday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across 18 trillion miles (29 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of three light-years. The signal, despite traveling 186,000 miles per second (or 671 million miles per hour, or um, 1 billion kilometers per hour), will still take 17 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. Um, I can wait.
On another note, the Sent Forever signal that was transmitted from the United Kingdom at 8:07 PM (California time) on October 5, 2009 is 17 trillion miles (27.4 trillion kilometers) from Earth as of this typing. I stated in past entries that I was gonna submit another message through Sent Forever, but unfortunately, it still looks like this won’t happen. The Sent Forever folks stated on their website back in 2010 that they were unable to renew their transmission license... I shouldn't have waited. But it's all good. Gliese 581d will do.
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