I always have trouble explaining to people just how fast light travels. Maybe this will help...

Here's a picture of my car (to the right) - it's a 1984 Pontiac Fiero. Imagine driving your car every day for 18 years. Every day for about 30 miles for 18 years. If it's just city driving, that would take about an hour. So every day for 18 years (Christmas, Thanksgiving, your birthday, it doesn't matter), you go and drive your car around town for about an hour. That's a little over 6,500 hours of driving, or, about 274 complete days (24/7) behind the wheel.

If you did that much driving (and your car didn't fall to bits on you - like mine is just about to), your odometer would look like the picture to the left: 186,282 miles after 18 years of driving. This is also how far light travels in just ONE SECOND (and is the definition of a light-second).

At this rate, and if my car would last that long, I'd hit a distance of two light seconds sometime in 2030!

Of course if I really kept at it, I could cover the same distance light does in one year if I drove 30 miles every day until the year 568,038,802. (I don't think that's going to happen - and it sort of explains part of the problem with traveling to stars - space is big - I mean really big.)