Four 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 four years ago today. As of 7 PM California time tonight (12 PM Sydney time on Wednesday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across 24 trillion miles (38 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of four 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 16 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. I'll twiddle my thumbs during the wait.
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