Originally Posted by Antarctica!

"Well... It's really hard to convey - these distances aren't anything we deal with regularly, so the numbers don't mean anything to us. But... Light travels at a speed of nearly 300,00 kilometres per second. That's six times around the Earth in one second. It takes a little more than a second for light to get from Earth to the Moon.

"Now, for light to reach us from the Sun takes 8 minutes. The average distance is 150 million kilometres. The furthest planed in our Solar System, Neptune, is already 4.5 billion kilometres away, or about four hours for light.

"But the closest star to us is already four light-years away. In kilometres, that's about 40 million million kilometres, or a 4 followed by 13 zeroes. Four light-years is, of course, nothing again on the galactic scale. The galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. That's, er, a lot of space."