“Pessimism NJ….”
Not really, OG. Just plain realism. “New Horizons”, the spacecraft that has delivered the images of “Ultima Thule” has been described as having ventured into “deep space”. It’s done nothing of the kind. It is around four billion miles from Earth and has taken 13 years to get there. It has taken over three years to cover the additional 1.5 billion miles from Pluto, which it passed in 2015, to the Kuiper Belt where it now is. Radio signals from it take around ten hours to get back to the Earth.
By contrast the nearest star (our “next door neighbour” in the universe) is around 4.3 light years away. That is some 25,000 billion miles or more than six thousand times as far a New Horizons currently is. Even if we had a spacecraft that could travel at one tenth the speed of light (around 67 million mph) which is most unlikely ever to be achieved it would take 43 years to get there. Radio signals from it would take 4.3 years to reach Earth. And that, of course, is just the nearest star.
I am no pessimist when it comes to new developments or projects. I love learning about new discoveries. And don’t get me wrong, the New Horizons project is a damned fine achievement. But the Solar System, which it has taken so long to reach the outer reaches of, is but a grain of sand in the Sahara that is the Universe.