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Comment by jamesgill | Hacker News Reader

If Voyager could stay operational and keep its speed of ~61,000 km/hr, it would reach the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) in about 72,000 years.

My mind understands the numbers, but can't grasp them.

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For reference, the oldest cave drawings we know of were made by neanderthals around ~70,000 years ago [0].

[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2018/02/neanderthals-art....

Próxima Centauri is about 250 million years older than our sun. Makes it not-impossible their earth like planet had advanced entities capable of sending their own voyager towards earth. Possibly it flew by while we were still in our Mesozoic Era and all they saw were dinosaurs.

I love thinking about things like this, but we will never know!

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I traveled back in time to the days of the Dinosaurs and just observed how the world was back then.

But I wonder if I'd be able to survive. The atmosphere, environment, microbes, etc, would be drastically different from what we've evolved to handle. Millions of years ago is a very long time!

Edit: Apparently microbes from millions of years ago would be so evolutionary distant that they might not regard me as host.

I always do this too - imagine being just an observer, in first person, at random points in time in history.

I'm hoping VR will help with this.

You will like this 1952 story by Ray Bradbury:

https://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/ASoundofThunder....

No, it would no reach that star. It is not aimed at it but at the constellation Ophiuchus.

You're right; I was thinking of distance traveled, not direction.

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