If a space object is 64 light-years away how many years would it take us to get there just curious?

Answer 1

The short answer is that the time it required to go that distance would depend the speed you traveled to get there.

An equation to use to answer this question is:

distance = speed x time.

Since you are asking "how long," we solve that for time:

time = distance / speed.

[Notice that as your speed goes up, the time required to cover the distance decreases.]

A light year is defined as the distance that light travels in 1 year. (It is a large distance, since light travels 300,000 km each second!)

If we could travel at the speed of light, it would take 64 years to get there. Relativity laws don't permit us to travel that fast, so let's pretend that we could somehow travel at 1/1000 the speed of light (or 300 km/s, still an extremely high speed!), it would take us 64 x 1000 = 64,000 years. That's longer than a human lifespan, of course, so the object that is 64 light years away is not attainable in our lifetime!

Answer 2

Well your question takes some Math to compute.
64 Light Years times 6 Trillion Miles = 384 Trillion Miles
if we assume that the object we are aiming at does not move and that is a pretty flimsy assumption.

Now divide 384 Trillion Miles by the speed in Miles Per Hour of the space craft you are traveling in. your question failed to discuss this aspect of the trip, but let us suppose that your craft travels at about 38,000 Miles Per Hour. Roughly that is 10 Billion Hours of direct flight in a straight line.

Divide 10 Billion Hours by 8,760 Hours Per Year and you will arrive at your requested number of years. At a rough estimate I can see that number being something on the order of 1,250,000 years give or take some. So, I would make sure to take lots of air, food, and water with you on this voyage. If we assume that your life span is between 50 and 100 years, It will take 1250 to 2500 generations to reach your destination. For that reason, I would not plan on making this trip alone.

As I see it, your problem is not one of somehow going there...rather, it is a problem of what to do once you arrive. At that point you will need to decellerate, land, refuel, and reprovision everything. My guess is that the availability of high thrust rocket fuels will be sort of non existant, and that you will find other needed materials pretty scarce also. As a result, I would rethink this entire process a little bit more prior to blasting off on your trip.

Answer 3

Nicholas C was not thinking.

How long would a Solar Sail work? The sun's radiation pressure would only be powerful enough I suspect to the edge of the Solar System.

The force would drop off at the square of the distance. Every light year represents about 2000 times the distance of Neptune from the sun.

64 light years would be about 120,000 times the distance of Neptune. Square that, and you will see how much the sun's radiation pressure would drop off

1.2 x 10^5 x 1.2 x 10^5

= 1.44 x 10^10

In other words, the solar pressure would have dropped off by over a factor of 10 billion over its pressure at the edge of the Solar System. And I am not sure the sail would be that effective at Neptune.

Answer 4

If the space object is not moving and you travel at a speed of light it would take 64 years!
Speed of light is 3 X 10^8 meters per second
the object you mentioned is : (3*10^8 )*64*365*24*60*60 meters away! (you can calculate and convert to your preferred units;-)
So you have to travel that much distance. If the object is not moving you simply divide this distance by the speed of your vehicle and you get the time. (if your vehicle travels at speed of light it would take 64 years!)
If its moving away from you you might need more time (You need to integrate and diferentiate to answer this.) If its moving towards you might need lesser time eventually.

The fastest means of transportation as I know of is 150,000 miles per hour (convert this into meters pers second if you want to actually calculate)
So divide that distance I told you with this speed to get the actual times.
It seems like about 300,000 years with the current means of transportation!

Answer 5

It would depend on how fast you go of course. At the speed of light, it takes 64 years to go 64 light years. At the speed of the fastest space craft we have ever launched, which is about 40,000 MPH, it would take over a million years.

Answer 6

This would depend on how fast you are traveling. To reach the closest star to our sun traveling at the speed of the fastest craft to have left the Earth has been estimated to take about 70,000 years. This star is about 4.5 light years away so it would take about 994,000 to reach a star 64 light years away.

Answer 7

Depends on your means of propulsion. If you had a continuous propulsion capability (we do with things like nuclear and ion engines), you could accelerate half the way there and then flip around and decelerate the other half of the way. You would only reach your max speed at the mid point, all other times your are accelerating or braking. I would have to calculate out actual speeds with our current thrust capabilities, but figure in a gross sense, that it would take about a 1000 years.

Answer 8

Voyager is traveling away from the solar system at about 3.3 AUs per year or about a half-hour of light per year.

So 2*24*365*64 years at that rate.

Even if you jacked that speed up a couple orders of magnitude, we're talking thousands of years.

Answer 9

The fastest spacecraft launched from Earth was actually "New Horizon" at 35,800 mph (about 313,608,000 miles per year). The Helios probes of the sun went faster, but that was due to the sun's gravity.

Light travels about 675,000,000 mph, about 6 trillion miles per year (a light-year).

About 19,132 years per light year or nearly 1.25 million years.

The closest star is merely 75,000 years away though.

Answer 10

It depends on how fast it would be going. speed equals distance divided by time. If it was traveling the speed of light it would obviously take 64 years.