Written in the Stars . . . a Million Miles Away . . .?

There is a really annoying song that has been stuck in my head. I don't know who sings it or what it is called, and don't care enough to look it up, but part of the chorus goes like this:

Written in the Stars,
A million miles away.


This has really been bothering me. First off, there is no star that is a mere million miles away from us. Not one. Not even our own sun. Our sun is 93,000,000 miles away from us on average. The closest planet to us is Venus (and I guess you could mistake it for a star), and it is over 23,000,000 miles away.

I thought maybe it was just me that was annoyed by this, but on hearing the song in the car with my wife the other day she complained about the same thing. A million miles is such a short distance.

And so, lets find out just how wrong this artist is. The closest star to us is Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away. So all we need to do is find out how many miles are in a light year, and multiply that by 4.24.

So, here we go:

60 (sec) * 60 (min) = 3,600 (seconds in an hour)
3,600 * 24 (hrs) = 86,400 (seconds in a day)
84,400 * 7 (days per week) = 604,800 (seconds in a week)
604,800 * 52 (weeks) =  31,449,600 (seconds per year)

Now, we have 31,449,600 seconds in one year, and the speed of light travels at 186,282 miles per second, so all we need to do is multiply the two together and you have how many miles are in one light year.

31,449,600 * 186,282 = 5,858,494,387,200

Almost 6 Trillion miles in one single light year. Finally, to find how many miles to Proxima Centauri we multiply that by 4.24:

5,858,494,387,200 * 4.24 = 24,840,016,201,728

To the nearest star it is 24.8 trillion miles. That is a difference of 24,840,015,201,728 miles. Kind of a big deal.

Maybe the song shouldn't bug me so much. Maybe I shouldn't take it quite so literal, but seriously... Just such a big error. I propose they change the lyrics to:

Written in the Stars
Trillions of miles away . . .

or

Light-years away . . .




*Also, to give you an idea on just how big of a number that is, if we were to start counting in the days of cave men (lets say starting on the year 10,000 BC for a nice found number), and count up until now we would only be at around 378 billion. So, in the year 785,000 (give or take a few thousand years), we'd have reached around 25 trillion seconds. 25 trillion miles is too far for us to really understand.