Science

objects, distance and time is good to keep in mind when talking about the things our terrific telescopes like Hubble and Webb are revealing to us. I'm sure the Muskites will be convinced he can get them there in their lifetimes maybe by sling-shotting them around the sun and giving them a boost with his solar battery array on the way past Earth. But our fastest ever spacecraft have been the recent probes to the sun which have achieved speeds of 364,660 miles per hour. Even if we had a manned craft that could do that speed or even if we wanted to send a probe to this new Webb discovery we need to do some math in order to see how relative things are (sorry Albert) to this task.

The distance of this object is stated as 200 light years which is 1.18 quadrillion miles. Our fastest craft would need 3,235,890,966 hours to reach that object. That is 134,828,790 days which means 369,393 years.

I have dropped anything to the right of the decimal point and I didn't account for slight difference in hours per day being slightly less than 24 or for the added days of leap years. It's not needed in order to demonstrate the magnitude of distance, time and speed we are talking about. Now I know nobody is really talking about going there or sending a probe and I know and agree that our discoveries are important about furthering our understanding of how the things in the Universe have and are developing. But then again will it really be so long before Eloon is proposing something along these lines regarding space travel and selling "reservations" for some promised future date of travel to Mars etc.? Maybe this guy is in the Musk bloodline.