When I was a kid they told me that space was unimaginably far away.
Trusting person that I am, never tried to. Imagine it.
Later they told me that the border to space is not THAT far away but 100km up,
and I took it for granted that it still was unimaginably far.
When they told me that there are places on earth where the sea is farther away than space, it was OK, I always thought that it had something to do with altitude.
But but yesterday I read this article about space and orbital speed, and when Randall Munroe told me that in … like Seattle space is closer than the sea I thought:
Wait … I always thought Seattle is on the West Coast?
So I looked at a map, did some calculations – turns out that Seattle is farther away from the sea than Munich from the alps. About 200km.
And that was when I realized that home,
the place where I was born,
is farther away from me than the border to space!
What do we learn from this?
That ‚far far away‘ sometimes is just ‚far away‘,
and that you always have to look for yourself.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of…