One definition of the sublime

It has to be said: the stars exist beyond human time, beyond human reach. We live in the little pearl of warmth surrounding our star; outside it lies a vastness beyond comprehension. The solar system is our one and only home. Even to reach the nearest star at our best speed would take a human lifetime or more. We say 'four light-years' and those words 'four' and 'years' fool us; we have little grasp of how far light travels in a year. Step back and think about 299,792,458 meters per second, or 186,282 miles per second – whichever you think you can grasp better. Think of that speed traversing 671 million miles in every hour. Think about it traversing 173 astronomical units a day; an astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, thus 93 million miles – crossed 173 times in a day. Then think about four years of days like that. That gets light to the nearest star. But we can propel ourselves to only a few percent of the speed of light; so at 2 percent of the speed of light (ten million miles an hour!) it will take about two hundred years to go those four light-years. And the first stars with Earthlike planets are more like twenty light-years away.

 It takes a hundred thousand years for light to cross the Milky Way. At 2 percent of that speed – our speed, let us say – five million years. 

 The light from the Andromeda Galaxy took 2.5 million years to cross the gap in our galaxy. And in the universe at large, Andromeda is a very nearby galaxy. It resides in the little sphere that is our sector of the cosmos, a neighbor galaxy to ours. 

So. Our little pearl of warmth, our spinning orrery of lives, our island, our beloved solar system, our hearth and home, tight and burnished in the warmth of the sun – and then – these starships we are making out of Nix. We will send them to the stars, they will be like dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see them again.

from Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, p. 328-29