Almost 43 years after launching from Cape Canaveral in September 1977, NASA’s space probe Voyager 1 has traveled 13.9 billion miles from Earth—nearly 150 times the distance from our planet to the sun. With six of its 10 science instruments offline as the spacecraft conserves its dwindling power, Voyager 1 is cruising through space at more than 38,000 miles per hour with respect to the sun, which from that outlying location would look more than 22,000 times dimmer than it does to us. Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth. On a cosmic scale, though, the probe has barely left home.

Although Voyager 1 has technically entered interstellar space, it’s still in our sun’s backyard: The probe won’t even enter the Oort Cloud, the most remote region of our solar system, for hundreds of years, and it will take tens of thousands of years to travel through it. Signals currently take almost 21 hours to travel to or from Voyager 1 at light speed, which means it’s less than a light-day away. The closest planet outside of our solar system, the potentially habitable Proxima b, is more than 4.2 light-years away. Were Voyager 1—which is moving at more than 10 miles per second, fast enough to circumnavigate Earth in under 40 minutes—pointed in the right direction, it would still take about 75,000 years to reach Proxima b, our solar system’s nearest neighbor. Proxima b’s star, Proxima Centauri, is one of hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which probably harbors billions of Earth-like planets. And the Milky Way is only one of 100 billion to 200 billion galaxies in the universe. There’s a mind-blowing amount of matter out there. And all but a few precious specks of it are inconceivably far away.

[Read Ben Lindbergh's piece examining how NASA ensures that contaminants from our COVID-contaminated world don’t reach other planets.]