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So think how difficult it would be to navigate through that mess.
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I'm not sure it would be. It looks like a mess, but 20 light-years is a lot of room to spread out in.
If you were in NASA'S Juno Mission spacecraft, the fastest man-made object, traveling at 25 miles per second, it would take 148,800 years to travel down the elephant's trunk. And if difficult space navigation took 1 full day to plan and execute, you would have time to make 54,312,000 course corrections--over the course of 1,488 100-year lifetimes.
In your lifetime, would you travel far enough (one 1500th of this image) for things to stop looking basically homogeneous? Or are those dark areas just packed solid with all that dust and gas--like, continuously turbulent?