Just the other day I heard a “science” person say the nearest star was billions of miles away (I think it was on dropout TV, but it may have been YouTube), and I understand that billions may as well be unreachable, but trillions is a not a non-understandable number. Why do we want so badly to scale things to dimensions contained in our own solar system?
Approximately 4 light-years, that’s how I’ve always heard that distance described.
Now I am not sure the distance light travels in one year is easier to grasp, but at least it’s a single digit.
Our Light makes it from the giant fusion explosion to us on the mud ball in 8 minutes. And 5.5 hours to the poor butt of a joke that is Pluto. So … 4 years you say…
Actually, it takes light between 10,000 to 170,000 years to reach the surface of the sun. It bounces around in there for a long time since all the fusion actually happens in the core.
To demonstrate how mind boggling huge space actually is.
I like the demo where the guy puts a pea for the sun on the ground, a tiny dot for Earth and then drives out of state to put down a radish seed to display Proxima Centauri to scale. It shows those trillions of kilometers nicely.