zlacker

When you start getting beyond the "thousands of football fields" it starts becoming difficult to conceptualize. In this case, even though GP was asking for football fields, it may be easier to visualize it as flying nearly 800 thousand times around the entire equator of earth. And voyager is going around the equator roughly once every 45 minutes or so.

So to catch up, you would have to be faster. Let's say you were able to travel around the equator in 15 minutes, so you're gaining 30 minutes per equator. If my napkin math is right, it would take you roughly 45 years to catch up to voyager.

>>chesch+(OP)
> When you start getting beyond the "thousands of football fields" i

I feel like that line is somewhere between 5 and 15 for americans, and not "thousands". And probably at around "oh the handegg one, no, I have no idea how big one is in the first place" for rest of the world

>>chesch+(OP)
Your parent was not suggesting to catch it, but rather to launch a transmitter to intercept Voyager's radio beam as a relay. Unnecessary, but creative.

>>ilyt+3h
As an American, I've never seen more than maybe 2-3 football fields next to each other. They're usually stand alone items so that is even rare. Imagining them in plural at all is something people likely do with a large degree of error is my guess, even for us American's that are familiar with the size of a single field. It's a awfully small unit for anything related to space. Even a kilometer which is ~11x as long as an American football field is a small unit for space.

>>chesch+(OP)
> 800 thousand times around the entire equator of earth

This probably wasn't your intention, but putting it in terms like this, for me anyway, actually drives home just how short a distance the Voyager probes have travelled.

>>messe+ys1
I just wanted to make the distance something that could be understood and processed. Sounds like it worked!

>>ip26+Br
My math also didn't account for the fact that voyager would continue traveling in those 45 years you'd be trying to catch up, so it would actually take longer to catch up to it anyways.

>>chesch+6u1
You definitely did a good job. I'm an avid sci-fi reader, write it as a hobby, spend a not-insignificant amount of my free time reading up on space news, and even have a degree in mathematical physics; this is the first time in a long time that an analogical choice of units has had an impact on my perception like that. Well done!

>>ilyt+3h
For order of magnitude descriptions, American and Association Football fields can be treated as approximately equivalent lengths. (The former is slightly larger counting the endzones as part of the size, slightly smaller if not counting them.)