Let’s say we use 79 years as the average human lifetime in this case. How many miles does the Solar System travel in that time? How many human lifetimes would be required to travel a distance equivalent to the distance from Proxima Centauri to the Solar System traveling at the Solar System’s speed through the galaxy?
We orbit the milky way at a speed of 830 000 km/h. Over a 79 years lifetime, that’s 575 billions kilometers or 357 billions miles. A light year is about 9 500 billions kilometers. So, in a lifetime, you’d travel about 1/20th of a light year in the Milky Way.
That’s assuming I didn’t make a mistake in my calculations.
Oh, I forgot : so, it would take about 70 lifetimes (5500 years) to travel to a distance equivalent to the distance to Proxima.
Space ship Earth doesn’t get very far in our meager lives, does it?
I believe you got it right clairobscur.
To put it another way: A galactic year (i.e., the time required for the solar system to make one orbit around the center of the galaxy) is 225-250 million years. In one lifetime you’ll travel around 0.000035% of the way around the center of the galaxy.
(I think that’s the right number of zeroes.)
So, for the country singers around here, all that information above means that the song “I’ve Been Everywhere” is an exaggeration. When you sing it, keep that in mind.
Yeah, but their wife left and the dog died, so they can be excused.
[Indiana Jones]It ain’t the years, kid. It’s the mileage.[/Indiana Jones]
In a very real way, we’re all space travelers.
Furthermore, the Sun bobs up and down with respect to the central plane of the Milky Way (due to the gravity of the other stars in the galaxy) with an amplitude of roughly 200 light years and a period of 128 million years. Given that we passed through the plane of the Milky way 3 million years ago, how much added distance do we get from that bobbing? I tried to work it out myself, but my trig/dimensional analysis is failing me at the moment. (I’m fairly sure that the distance doesn’t make a significant chance to clairobscur’s answer, though.)
It’s next to nothing. In 70 years, it’s about 70/128000000 * 200 = .0001 light years compared to the 1/20 light year already determined. You could do more calculations to do the right trigonometry, but I see little point.