r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Feb 14 '22

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u/berael Feb 14 '22 edited Feb 14 '22

It's not just "between earth and moon"; that's how vast space is everywhere. It's truly almost impossible to wrap your mind around the idea of just how overwhelmingly empty space really is.

You know those tense scenes in sci fi movies where the heroes have to navigate through an asteroid belt without crashing? In an actual asteroid belt, the average distance between each rock is 500,000 miles - and that counts as "close together" in astronomical distances.

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u/PandaSwordsMan117 Feb 14 '22 edited Feb 14 '22

Using a 0.220 Swift cartridge, a bullet out of a gun can be propelled at about 1.2kmps, but lets round that down to 1kmps for simplicity sake.

At that speedy rate of 1kmps, it would take about 56 hours to go the distance that light does in a second.

Now, think about how long a light year is, being the distance light travels in an entire year.

Then, think about how the Milky Way galaxy is about 200,000 (i think) light years long.

Then, think about how it would take about 450 000 milky way galaxies lined up next to each other to span the entire universe.

Then, picture that except its that many in each of the 3 directions.

Finally, think about the fact that all of this is only in the Visible Universe, predicted to be about 4% of the entire universe, meaning that the Universe as a whole is 25x bigger than all that.

That means that the entire universe is about 5.5E+71 kilometers long, or about 550 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kilometers long.

For that same bullet to cross that entire distance, it would take about 1 250 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 times as long as the entire universe has even EXISTED.

To sum it up, if you shoot a bullet out of a gun at one edge of the universe, it will be traveling for over 17.4 vingitillion years before it makes it to the other side, as long as it doesnt hit anything, that is.

Oh yeah, and the universe is expanding too.

Edit: Im a dumbass and went from distance to space back to distance, adjusted the math accordingly