This should be mandatory viewing to every man, woman and child on the planet. It seems like since the moon landing, the answer for the human race was space. But really, the only way we survive is here, on Earth, cause everything else is REALLY far away.
There are some scale models of the solar system in various museums and universities.
I saw the one at UC Boulder a decade ago and remember being blown away by the ratio of how small the planets are to their solar distances.
To make the model fit within the campus, the planets, especially the non-gas-giants, are surprisingly small. And much further away from the Sun than you'd naively think from the usual solar system drawings in the science books.
Fascinating. So, the solar system looks mostly empty even when compressed into one dimension, with the distances between what looks like tiny specks of matter being on the order of hundreds of millions kilometers. I am left wondering if the same is true, say, for the Milky Way with its half a trillion stars.
" I am left wondering if the same is true, say, for the Milky Way with its half a trillion stars."
Interstellar space is vastly more empty (it takes >4 years to cross to the nearest star at light speed vs few hours from Sun to Pluto). Intergalaxy space is unimaginatively huge and empty. Also, don't forget that space is 3d, so traveling in straight line you won't encounter so many objects as 2d map would suggest.
When I was bored some time ago I did the math just to have a picture in mind what the solar system would look like when the sun is a ball of 10cm diameter. I made no fancy visualization but I think the numbers are impressive of their own.
So, if the sun is a small ball hovering in the middle of an empty space:
- the earth is a pinhead circling at a distance of 8m
- with a speck of dust circling it 2cm away (a.k.a. the moon)
- Jupiter is a marble 40m away from the sun
- the next sun is 2km away
- oh, and the light moves with the speed of a snail. So you want to visit the next planet system? If you fly with speed of ligth, it's like a snail crawling from Berlin to Madrid.
What's impressive for me are not the size differences of all the objects but how empty the space is.
Just what I needed, something to make me feel worthless at 4 o clock in the morning after a night session of coding away in cyberspace for 1s and 0s that will be lost in time.
