An enjoyable little video demonstrating just how small and insignificant we are when compared to the whole universe, this is one of the best demonstrations of the relative size of planets and stars that I have seen.
The link came from David Thompson’s latest Friday Ephemera which is a brilliantly simple set of links guaranteed to entertain – if you have not had the pleasure before I would recommend a visit.
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very nice submit, i certainly love this web site, carry on it
Last September I blogged on a Daily Mail article about how crowded and full of asteroids the sky is, accompanied by this YouTube clip, and how the Fail hadn’t said anything about taking scale into consideration. Here in Melbourne we’re lucky enough to have a 1/1,000,000,000 scale model of the solar system and it really drives home to you how much empty space there is between everything. The sun is about five foot across and standing right next to it you can’t see any of the model planets. At a billionth scale Mercury is only a couple of hundred feet away but is only a few millimetres across, and while Venus is more than twice the diameter it’s over a hundred yards off. Earth? Forget it. Jupiter’s the first one you come to that’s bigger than a fingernail and even then good luck picking out a ball less than six inches across from half a mile away. Beyond Jupiter the rest of the model isn’t even in the same suburb anymore. Asteroids aren’t modelled at all but I guess it’s be like taking a handful of flour and chucking it into the air between Mars and Jupiter on a windy day. Down here on our little rock and in our crowded cities it’s easy to forget not only how big many of the other objects are in the universe, but that almost 100% of the universe consists of nothing at all.
That is actually somethign I have thought about trying to get made here for a long time until I realised that this little town where I live isn’t anywhere near big enough to have a proper scale model without the outer planets ending up lost in the middle of nowhere. The huge scale of the universe is beyond real comprehension in much the same way as trying to imagine what a billion pound/dollars of government debt is. As soon as you start trying to think of light years you may as well hit the bottle. 🙂