Quote:
Originally posted by Feeble Minded
itd take, from the nearest galaxy to ours, 4 light years to get here. (a light year is number of years it takes traveling at the speed of light to get from point a to point b). taking that into consideration, aliens would need to go at at least a tenth the speed of light to get to earth and back to their planet in their lifetime. (assuming that their lifetime is about 80 years).
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Your logic is right, but your numbers are fucked. A light year IS the distance that light travels in 1 year. That you got correct. It's about equal to 6 trillion miles. But the border of just the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy, alone is
60,000 light years away. And then the border itself is another 6500 light years thick. So for someone to start out just on the edge of our galaxy, and then make it to Earth would take a total of 66,500 light years. Considering that they're coming from an entirely different galaxy, the distance is many thousands more light years away, and then you would realize that they would have to travel MUCH, MUCH faster than the speed of light to get to Earth within an 80 human year life span, not just 1/10th of the speed of light.
Here's a scientific article verifying all the figures Ive got in this post:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3728659/