I'm pretty sure that I will be thought of as either a loser or a cheat for this, but I'm saying it anyway. One of my hobbies are reading literature study guides from the internet.(Oh you know, like Sparknotes?) My favourite website is actually one. It's called Shmoop. And just recently I discovered one of the coolest scientific facts ever through this website and I HAD to have it in my blog.

When he wrote his Special Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein calculated the speed of light as 3.0 x 10ˆ8 meters/second. This means that light isn't just everywhere at once—it has to travel from its source to its destination, and it always travels at the exact same speed. Have you ever heard of a light-year? We bet you have. Think Star Wars. A light-year is simply the distance that light can travel in a year. As you can imagine, a light-year is a very long distance since light travels extremely fast (the actual distance of one light-year is just under ten trillion kilometers). So what does this all have to do with stars? Well, by applying the speed of light to the study of space, astronomers realized that the stars we see up in the sky when we're out having a romantic evening might not even be there anymore. When we see a "star" at night, we don't see the star the way it looks today. Instead we see light emitted from a star long ago—light that may have taken ten billion years to reach us. Light as old as the universe itself. It's a fascinating concept; to look into the night sky and literally be looking into the past...Some astronomers estimate that if aliens actually existed, they would be at least 200 light years away from us. That means if these supposed aliens were able to look into powerful telescopes and watch us, they would see us in powdered wigs and buggies. That's right, they would be seeing us in the early 1800s, because the light that our earth emitted 200 years ago would just now be reaching them. Ridiculous! But true.