Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/19/this-animated-video-of-light-p.html
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Well, space is big.
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And you thought it was a long walk to the chemists.
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That’s just peanuts.
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Um, Mars is not at a fixed distance from the earth…
Still, it is a nice visualization.
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The video specifically lists the Earth-Moon distance and the average distance and the Earth-Mars distance as closest approach. It’s in the lower left-hand corner.
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My point is that the distance can differ by nearly an order of magnitude, which, to me, is more interesting.
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Okay. 
Celestial mechanics is great, but that’s not what this video is about.
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tl;dr - why can’t you just do one at Warp speed?
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Obviously not scientific, rather an analysis of fan theory and inconsistent canon, but you might enjoy this…
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“Are we there yet?”
“What about now?”
“What about now?”
“Are we there yet?”
“Are we there yet?”
“Are we?”
“Are we?”
“What about now?”
Space is too damn big for photons to take family vacations.
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“Don’t make me pull this beam over!”
(Though of course in their own frame of reference time is frozen.)
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So they’re already there, or…?
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We’ll get there when we get there!
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Well, anything moving in the reference frame of a light-speed particle would be unable to experience time at all. If a traveler could somehow travel at the speed of light, they’d have no experience of the journey, so for the photon one could say its entire world-line from emission to absorption “happens” at once, though in another sense nothing happens in its reference frame at all. Of course there’s no good way to discuss happening because the language of causality is developed from our own (very) tardyonic experiences.
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Isn’t the speed of light the maximum speed which anything that lacks mass travels in a vacuum, in our universe anyway? So these could represent radio waves as well, ya?
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Or, light is slow.
