We think of light speed as dizzyingly fast, but it’s still disastrously slow given the roomy universe we find ourselves in. NASA astronomer James O’Donoghue designed these videos to illustrate. If we could bend it around Earth, light would orbit the planet in 0.13 seconds:

And it takes only 1.255 seconds to reach the moon:

But it takes fully 3 minutes to reach our neighboring planet Mars at its closest approach:

Light from the sun takes more than 8 minutes to reach Earth. To reach the closest star takes more than 4 years.