655 Million Miles

I (and sometimes my kids) have been watching episodes of the original Twilight Zone TV series. The original series aired from 1958 to 1964. Until this year I had never seen an episode. At this point I'm nearing the end of season one and it is very good! The stories are original, imaginative, and contain a great deal of science fiction. But it's TV and TV shows come with many misconceptions. I recently watched an episode (episode 20 or 21 in season 1) in which a group of astronauts lands on another planet, out of fuel. They have no way of getting back and to convey how far away they are from Earth, they state the distance in miles. The astronauts are 655 million miles from Earth.

A distance of 655 millions miles seems like an incredible distance until you compare it to the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The Earth-Sun distance is already 93 million miles, so 655 million miles, although greater, is not that great. In fact, it is not very far at all when considering astronomical distances and space travel. This is only 7 astronomical units (7 AU) which puts it past Jupiter in the Solar System, but not Saturn. Granted, this is the late 1950s, but even then we knew the distance to planets, so 655 million miles was, even at that time, not a large distance.

Today, the farthest man made satellite is the Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is now at a distance of 143 AU and growing. This equates to a distance of 13.3 billion miles. This seems like a great distance, but this isn't even out of the Solar System yet! The nearest star, Promixa Centauri, is 4.22 light years from us. That's 24.8 trillion miles! Yet it's the CLOSEST star. I get what the writers of this Twilight Zone episode were trying to do, but a few hundred million miles is close, not far. For a different planet in a different solar system, they needed a minimum distance of several tens of trillions of miles.

Despite this under representation of distance, the Twilight Zone is still a great show!