Sixteen 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 in the summer of 2009.
As of 7 PM California time tonight (12 PM Sydney time on Thursday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across approximately 94 trillion miles (151 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of sixteen 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 about 4 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. Carry on!
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