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Comment by jtbayly

2 hours ago

I’m confused. Is it 11k years to the closest galaxy at the speed of light, or somehow accessible in a human lifetime?

Relativity is weird. If you keep accelerating, at some point the objects stop accelerating toward you faster but the distances get shorter.

To an outside observer, the trip might have taken you millions or billions of years while to you it was only ten or twenty.

It’s helpful to think about the limit. To light, which travels at the speed of light, it arrives at your retina the exact moment it was created in the core of the sun. From our perspective, it took almost a million years (about a million years to make it from the core to the convective region, then another few minutes to travel from there to Earth).