From The Atlantic. Thirty-five years ago, NASA launched a
spacecraft known as Voyager 1 into the skies over Florida. That
space-traveling appliance has now traveled farther than any
other man-made device — some 11.3 billion miles or 121 times the
distance between Earth and the sun. It is now hurtling through
the boundary of our heliosphere (the farthest reaches of our
sun’s winds) at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour. Soon, nobody
quite knows when, it will break into interstellar space, the
first creation of life here on Earth to do so. Puts things into
perspective.