“Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system. Ever. It’s just too far.” — Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson’s book “A Short History of Nearly Everything” packs a punch. From the very first pages, it will turn your entire world upside down. Much of what follows is quoted or paraphrased from his book.

You’ve Never Seen a Scale Model of the Solar System

We’ve all seen models of the Solar System. But you’ve never seen a scale model.

“If you were to make a scale model of the solar system with Earth reduced to the size of a pea, Jupiter would be over 1,000 feet away, Pluto would be 1.5 miles away,” and it would be about the diameter of an iPhone charging cable, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.

“Even if you shrank everything down so Jupiter was the size of the period at the end of this sentence, Pluto would still be 35 feet away and the size of a bacteria.”

The Edge of Our Solar System

Pluto is not the edge of the Solar System. In fact, it’s not even close.

“At 4 billion miles from the sun, Pluto is only 1/50,000th of the way to the edge of our own little solar system.”

The basic unit of measure in our solar system is the “Astronomical Unit”. 1 AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It’s about 100 million miles.

Pluto is about 40 AUs. We don’t get to the end of our own solar system until passing through the outer edge of the Oort Cloud, which is somewhere between 10,000–100,000 AUs away.

“Obviously, we have no prospect of making that journey. Just traveling 240,000 miles to our own moon represents a major undertaking, and a manned mission to Mars, our neighboring planet, is still beyond us.”

The best speed yet achieved by Humans is about 38,000 miles per hour (Voyager 1 and 2), and at that speed, it will take 10,000 years to reach the edge of our own solar system. Longer than all of recorded history.

“It’s remarkable to think that the Sun has enough gravity to keep the objects of the Oort Cloud in orbit. If you were to somehow find yourself drifting in the Oort Cloud, the Sun would not even be the brightest star.”

What’s beyond our solar system?

“With Jupiter shrunk to the size of a period, Pluto would be 35 feet away, and Proxima Centauri, our nearest star would be almost 10,000 miles away.”

In reality, Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light-years away, and to reach it by spaceship using current technology would take at least 25,000 years.

“Even if you somehow made it there…you wouldn’t be anywhere of significance. To reach the next landmark, Sirus, would take another 4.6 light-years of travel.” Neither of these stars has habitable planets that we know of.

The closest “sun-like” solar system L 98–59, was only just discovered this month, August 2021. It’s 35 light-years away, and the planets are racing around their dwarf star at a rate of only 2–23 days per orbit compared to Earth’s 365-day orbit.

Have Aliens Visited Earth?

It's possible that aliens are traveling billions of miles to amuse themselves by making crop circles on earth, but it seems unlikely. The distance is simply too far.

“Space is enormous. The average distance between stars is 20 million, million miles. Even when traveling at the speed of light, the distances are challenging.’

It’s more likely that any interstellar visitors to Earth would arrive by a space-bending science fiction method that is currently beyond the ability of our brightest minds to even theorize.

According to Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, traveling by a wormhole would require “some very exotic type of matter and it’s not clear whether such matter exists in the universe.”

If Aliens are visiting Earth, it’s safe to assume their advanced technology would allow them to go completely undetected. Or that they would be so much more advanced they would destroy us without giving it any more thought than you do when you kill billions of bacteria by taking a shower.