This following article is taken from the manual of The Distant suns program written by yxcyxcyxcyx and i think it's really interesting so i had to rewrite it for THE OUTER LIMITS although I know I am breaking copyright laws here... Hope nobody from Virtual reality laboratories sees it and decides to sue me.


In the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
 author Douglas Adams sums up the universe this way:
"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the pharmacy but that's just peanuts to space."

And so it is. Consider a light beam travelling at 300,000 km a second leaving the surface of the sun when your morning alarm clock rings. It is 6:00 AM, Monday, February 8, 1988. By the time you've finally just started to consider rolling out of the sack at 6:08, the beam is sweeping through the orbit of the earth as it heads outward bound towards the edge of the solar system. After you've done showering, and ready to sit down to a bowl of Rice Krispies, it's 6:41, and Jupiter will be catching sight of the ray. It'll ve midmorning, 11:22, when the beam sweeps past the orbit of Pluto (and you thought you had a busy morning!) It won't be until the following Saturday afternoon, 5 1/2 days later, when the beam finally reaches the hypothesized cloud of comets, the "Oort Cloud", said to surround the solar system. At this point the beam leaves the solar system, but os only just beggining its ong journey beyond infinity.

Now you won't have to bother thinking about the ray until the next Presidential election in the fall of 1992. However after all this waiting, the beam has only reached the nearest star next to the sun, Proxima Centauri. In 1994 it reaches Barnard's Star, followed by tiny Wolf359 just in time for the 1996 Olympics. As you celebrate the turn of the century the beam will be racing by Tau Ceti with a full 20 stars behind it. In the next year it will overcome BD5-1668, L725.32, Kapteyn's Star and Kruger60A. The sun itself would apper as a rather bland yellowish star slowly receding into the galactic darkness.
By the end of the next century, your great-great-grandchildren will be alive as the beam passes beyond the likes of Sharatan, Hamal, Algol and Aldebaran. Likewise it will have overtaken Regulus, Talitha, Miaplacidus and Arcturus.

In 2219, the sun's light would just be reaching the open cluster The Pleiads, in the constelation of Taurus. The Starship Enterprise is just beggining it's 5 year journey into television history. Even after all of this, our journey is still beggining.

Now in your imagination, leave this age behind. Leave everything you've ever done, or known, behind. Leave you CD collection behind. Were the beam directed towards the constellation of Saggitarius it would be headed to the center of our galaxy the Milky Way. However it won't reach this point until about the year 32,000 AD. Yet there is still another 50,000 years before the ray can exit the other side of the galaxy. When it does it will leaving over 100 bilions stars behind. Yet this galaxy is an unremarkable one of unremarkable size many, many others beyond. And the yourney is still
begging.

By 200,000 AD the beam will be passing by the Magellanic Clouds in Tucana, satellite galaxies to our own. After this is nothing, nothing for the next 1.8 million
 years. Back on earth, we would see the sun as somewhat larger, turning reddish hue as it slowly burns out. But now, looming ahead is the Andromeda galaxy, our "sister" galaxy and a member of a local group. Looking back towards the Milky Way, you would see a wiev similar to what the Andromeda looks like on a fall evening: A fuzzy eliptical patch (although the sight would be more impressive). Another couple of million years will finnally see this beam escaping our corner of the< universe, travelling out to the open regions of space. Adams said it was big.

Now advance again, not another few million years, but a full 20 billion years from the present. The light beam from the sun has at last reached the edge of the known universe. If the solar system still exists it'll likely be a rather cold and un inviting place, the sun having burned itself out 15 billion years previously. OUt there what the beam would encouter is a giant unknown. Long ago however, scientist were able to see some objects they said were out there, quasars. But there also remain a mystery as do so many other things.

One of the amazing things in the universe is the range of both times and distances. For instance, in the above article we dealt with distances measured in trilions times trilions of miles. Yet at the same time, some of the most interesting objects such as black holes and neutron stars may measure only 10 to 20 kilometers in diameter. Or we commonly measure stellar processes in terms of millions of years. Yet there are stars, "pulsars", which flash 30 times/sec!