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Comment by vivzkestrel | Hacker News Reader

AT 10 trillion kms = 1 light year, 10 quadrillion km = 1000 light years, 10 quintillion kms = 1 million light years. Since Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, you are looking at an object 25 quintillion kms away. If that doesnt ring a bill, that is 25000 quadrillion kms away, 25 million trillion kms away! , 25 billion billion kms away!!! Simply put if you travelled 1 billion kms that would be 0.000000004% of the way to reach Andromeda galaxy. Imagine that!

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And even more: Every object you can see with the naked eye in the sky is within our milky way, except for the Andromeda galaxy and a handful of other galayies. If you know exactly where to look, you can see it as a little cloud with the naked eye.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_gal...

That led me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I found this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxy_groups_and_clus...

So there are actually a few galaxies visible with the naked eye outside of our local group even. However, all are within our local supercluster.

Star Trek ships travel (very roughly) 1000x the speed of light at Warp 9. So it would take the Enterprise (or Voyager) 2500 years to reach Andromeda at max speed.

that is still unfathomably slow i am afraid, looking at farther galaxies like the cartwheel galaxy at 500 million light years or hoag s object at 612 million light years, this star trek ship would take 50000 years at the minimum to reach there

Recreational mathematics, fun.

And if we could see it with the naked eye it would appear six times bigger than a full moon.

It is visible to the naked eye in good locations and conditions, actually.

It’s about the width of three finders on an outstretched hand.

And yet, Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way: next door neighbors in the small patch of the Universe known as the Local Group.

the further ones such as the cartwheel galaxy = 500 million light years = 5000 quintillion kms and hoag's object 600 million light years at 6000 quintillion kms are unfathomable to like ever reach. Given a quintillion has 1 followed by 18 zeroes, to cover 0.1% of a quintillion, we gotta travel 1 quadrillion kms, how the hell do we ever do that

Wormholes!

> If that doesnt ring a bill

That'll be 23 Zettameters, please.

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