Flying at the Speed of Light for a Decade...

Ten 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 Wednesday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across approximately 59 trillion miles (95 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of ten 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 10 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. Happy Tuesday!


"My name is Richard Par, and HELLO from planet Earth!!! I hope all is well in your civilization...and I hope you are a much more peaceful species than we are..."
Richard Par
August 17, 2009