Matt Walsh

It's currently 15 billion miles from Earth.

That's the farthest any man-made object has ever gone.

Surrounding our solar system is something called the Oort cloud, which is like a really big debris field, basically.

It's like ice and rocks and stuff.

And Voyager, and this is just the surrounding our, just our solar system.

Voyager will not make it to the inner edge of that cloud for another 300 years, traveling at 38,000 miles an hour, which is 70 times faster than a commercial airline.

300 years just to make it to this cloud.

It'll be another 30,000 years, yes, 30,000 years before it leaves the Oort cloud.

That's how big just this random cloud of dust around our solar system is.

Just to pass through it, it will take the Voyager longer than the entire history of human civilization.

Think about the time that's passed between the ancient Egyptians and us.

It's that times 10 just to get through this one little piece of the universe.

Even when it gets through, it'd still be another 10,000 years before it makes it within the vicinity of another solar system.

So if there is life just next door to us in the nearest solar system, our next door neighbor, if there is life, maybe the Voyager will find some indication of it in 40,000 years.

And even then, it probably won't actually find any indication because it's not exploring the solar system.

It's just kind of passing by it.

I'm just saying the distances are...

incomprehensible i mean they're so great that even if we could travel the speed of light which we can't obviously probably never will but if we could it would still take 25 000 years to make it to the closest neighboring galaxy like 100 billion galaxies in the universe that we know of just to make it to the closest one this is yeah just galactically we're talking about next door to us and uh it would be 25 000 years 300 lifetimes traveling at a speed that's impossible

So why haven't we, as far as we know, been contacted by any life in the universe?

Well, because everything is really, really, really far away.