Voyager 1 has been on the road, so to speak, for 35 years and it hasn't left this
solar system yet, it says here. So for all those who imagine that some day we will be instantly whizzing around at Warp 8 or 9 between galaxies, I have some bad news. At current speeds, it would take about half a million years for a craft to reach the nearest other star system 4.3 light-years from here. And they call it 'space' for a very good reason - there's a hell of a lot of it out there. And there's probably a good reason for that too - so we can't screw up anything else out there in the great beyond.
If you can find a copy of it, there's a good book called 'Beyond The Moon' by the Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei, in which he takes us on an imaginary space flight from here to the outer reaches of the then known universe, describing all the various points of interest along the way. As he says, such a journey would require an almost impossibly long time, but thanks to our imaginations, we can
zoom across those vast distances almost instantly. And that may be the only way most of us ever will be able to do that. It was a very interesting read and the ISBN number of the book is ISBN 0-380-48744-6 if it is still available. It will put Star Trek Voyager's adventures on TV into proper perspective for you.
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