Man-Made Objects - Distance Travelled

For tens of thousands of years man-made objects like boats had only travelled a few hundred miles between nearby islands. Then Marco Polo's epic voyages of the 13th Century clocked up 15,000 miles (24,000 km). The circumferance of the earth is only 40,000 km so there's really not much further you can go if you stick to the earth's surface. Columbus's voyages, for example were only a few thousand miles in length between Spain and the Americas..

In 1957 the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, which made it 223,000 km into orbit. In 1969 the USA managed to land a man on the moon at 395,101 km from earth, and then return to earth (so therefore approximately 800,000 km).

But these distances are absolutely dwarfed by the number of kilometres travelled later solar system probes:

Source: Figures from Space Alliance Forum

The record on the right there is for the Voyager 1 probe which has now travelled 17,413,166,489 km since its launch in 1977. It has since travelled 116 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun and exited the solar system altogether, and is still going off into interstellar space.

Source: NASA

It took this photo of the distant pale blue dot that is the Earth on its way out before losing contact with us altogether. Even travelling at speeds of over 35,000 miles per hour, it would take Voyager 1 nearly 80,000 years to travel the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri.

It's actually a bit of a cheat to say this is something that is getting better than it used to be, due to the length of time it takes to travel these incredible distances. This means that some of the older probes launched in the 1970s hold the record for the longest distances travelled, but as Voyager 1 is still going at 17,043 metres per second it's still an ongoing record.

Here's the distances travelled by year of launch, with the 1969 moon landings in there for scale:

Source: Figures from Space Alliance Forum

To put this in context, the 20th Century Voyager 1 has travelled 1,160,878 times as far as Marco polo's 13th century boat ever did.