A journey from the familiar to the unimaginable

Metro India News | Hyderabad

On September 5, 1977, humanity launched Voyager 1 towards the outer Solar System. Conceived to explore distant planets, the spacecraft also carried a more imaginative purpose: a message for any intelligent life it might someday encounter.

Scientist Carl Sagan helped create its Golden Record, containing greetings, music, Earth sounds, laughter and scientific information. Voyager 1 continues its extraordinary journey through interstellar space. NASA says it will reach one light-day on November 18, 2026—about 25.9 billion kilometres, the distance light travels in 24 hours. Science measures distance from the microscopic to the cosmic.

Quarks and leptons exist at scales around 10⁻¹⁸ metres, while DNA is about two nanometres wide. Cells measure roughly micrometres, Earth thousands of kilometres, the Milky Way around 200 billion stars, and the observable universe approximately 93 billion light-years across. These measurements reveal how surprisingly empty and vast our universe is. Yet Indian civilisation has long contemplated cosmic scale and cycles of creation and destruction, beautifully symbolised by the Chola Nataraja.

S K Joshi, 

retired chief secretary