If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system | Hacker News Reader

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system

joshworth.com

364 pointsZeljkoS81 comments

Neat! My favorite way to show the impossibly large scale of our universe: http://spaceengine.org/. Set your speed to 10 light years per second and watch the Andromeda galaxy just sit there.

Also fun to see how slow even the speed of light is. Start at the sun and head for earth. Once you reach Earth marvel at how fast you had been going.

Head towards Jupiter and, once again, marvel at how impossibly slow your going compared to even the nearest background stars.

> the impossibly large scale of our universe

The other planets are far away, other solar systems are far away, and the galaxy is huge.

But after that, the neighboring galaxies are surprisingly close. If we take 150k light years to be the diameter of Milky Way, and Andromeda is 2500k light years away, the distance between galaxies is less than 20 times the diameter of our galaxy.

I'd love to play with this but it's Windows only :(

Playing with its zoom function is fun (Page Up/Down/Home). You can basically reproduce the Hubble Deep Field with it by bumping up the galaxy magnitude limit (F8) and zooming in until the indicator in the lower right reads around 2'30".

And of course you can click on a galaxy and fly to it with a press of the g key. Watching thousands of galaxies zip by like stars in Star Trek is pretty mindboggling (also note that high warp is somewhere around 20 AU/sec using the TNG scale...)

Example I made a few days ago: https://imgur.com/a/xyZe8

Celestia is worth checking out as well: https://celestiaproject.net/

Not nearly in same league as Space Engine. I installed both just now. Celestia is already uninstalled after 5 minutes. It's too basic and the navigation controls are lacking compared with SpaceEngine - which is remarkable in how well it allows you to fly great distances at enormous speeds, with easy adjustment to for slowing down and re-positioning.

Sadly only for Windows, it looks like a very compelling package though!

OK, there is something scary in warping to, let's say, Proxima Cen, spawning an alien ship, and locking on to our solar system.

This is inaccurate. At even 1g acceleration Andromeda is just 28 years away. At 10 light years per second you would have passed it many many years ago.

Uhm, no? He's talking about a constant speed of 1 LY/s, and not an acceleration.

And what he said was nonsense; 10 LY/s is faster than light; you must be a hypothetical particle with some crazy properties and our math really breaks down at that point.

In space you need to think in terms of relative velocities less than c and acceleration. To get a reasonable sense of how far away Andromeda is consider how long it will take to get there, which is just a few years.

Are you talking about the Andromeda Galaxy? The one that is 2,500,000 light years away? At a constant 10 light years per second speed, that's 69 hours.

Also, even ignoring relativistic effects, it would take a very long time to get there at 1g acceleration.

d = a * t² / 2

2.3652e22 meters = 9.80665 m/s² * t² / 2

4.7304e22 meters = 9.80665 m/s² * t²

4.8237e21 s² = t²

6.9453e10 seconds = t

That's about 2200 years, not 28.

Why would you ignore relativistic effects?

Try entering the numbers here: http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel...

I think that taking traveler time instead of observer time when the discussion is scale of the universe isn't what people would expect. But I do agree that ignoring the relativity here is silly -- of course it makes the observer time close to the 2.5 million years you would expect given its distance.

And thanks for the site. Do you know whether it takes into account deceleration? Because getting to Andromeda at .99c isn't going to do much good unless you're heading somewhere else...

> Do you know whether it takes into account deceleration?

Looks like it does. If I plug in a distance of 980m and acceleration of 9.8m/s^2, it gives a 20s time. That's 10s of acceleration (0.5 * 9.8 * 100 == 490m traveled) and 10s of deceleration.

In Florianópolis, Brazil, there's a thing called Projeto Helius where someone has placed plaques along the waterfront showing the locations of the planets, to scale. They start off deceptively close together for the inner planets, just a few minutes' walk apart, but then it really takes a while to reach the outer planets.

http://www.1000dias.com/rodrigo/avenida-beira-mar-sistema-so...

I walked as far as Neptune but, like the author of the above blog post, didn't continue on to Pluto. (It isn't depicted on the map, but I just checked and all of these markers are Ingress portals/Pokestops, so it's easy to find other people's maps that show them. Pluto is a little south of the end of the park there.)

There's one in Zürich, too; the Planetenweg:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenweg_Uetliberg

It's the same scale, 1:10^9, and is about seven and a half kilometres long. Each station has a model of the planet, to scale. The sun is a big yellow ball on a post. The gas giants are small balls. The rocky planets are little flecks of material encased in plastic...

There are two Plutos, marking the summer and winter extremes.

Same in Zagreb, Croatia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Views && https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1vDLyUELWaKQJNIqC_M...

Pluto's orbit is so eccentric that perigee (the point closest to the sun) is actually inside the orbit of Neptune.

And of course I stupidly used the wrong term for perihelion. Perigee refers to the closest point to EARTH not the SUN.

But at this distance, it is the same... -- Robert Heinlein

A little less the same than Heinlein's original context, though Pluto was involved there, too. Anybody catch the reference?

Just stick with periapsis and thank Kerbel for making it easier to understand basic principles of orbits.

Your statement may still be correct, though.

The Evergreen Aviation Museum has something like this, in the main outdoor area between the buildings.

https://www.evergreenmuseum.org/

Every time I see these types of visualizations, I get the feeling of sadness, that we'll never visit other worlds outside of our own. The immensity of space is just incomprehensible. The closest star system Alpha Centauri, is over FOUR light years away. Time dilation will ensure that we will never again see whomever we send out into deep space.

Like compound interest, constant acceleration is powerful. 10/m/s/s gets you to 30,000 m/s in 3,000s. That's .1c in less than an hour. The energy required is mv^2, m being the mass of your vehicle, and you can annihilate anti-matter to get, theoretically, Mc^2 of energy out of it. That means you can get to .1c with M=mv^2/c^2=.1^2 or 1% of your vehicle mass of anti-matter. That's a small enough number to leave a lot of wiggle room.

(Much smaller, and more realistic, accelerations are possible over longer periods of time, but require using the use of relativistic equations of motion.)

I think you mixed up m/s and km/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s, so 30,000 m/s is only .0001c. At 1g, it actually takes a month to reach .1c. (Still, your point stands.)

Thank you for the correction! 3 OOM off is...embarrassing.

So you'll be mortified to learn you were off by 4 OOM.

I would be, but I wasn't. Last I checked 1km = 1000m.

Yes sure, great and all for those on the ship. For everyone else back on Earth. We'll never know.

No worries. We would be there in some years using VR. We should not be able to tell the difference one day.

That's pointless though and our brains will know it.

But so is traveling vast distances to experience something identical to what you can simulate ;)

That's not true. The primary reason we want to travel to other planets and stars is because we want to learn more. There's only so much a telescope can detect. Without going there, you won't even have what to simulate.

And the other reason for why we want to travel is because we want colonies. Given consumerism, population growth and the destruction of our environment, it gets pretty clear that we need a backup plan. This is why we still need human spaceflight, even if sending robots is much cheaper for discovery and learning purposes. And again, simulation is pointless.

Absolutely, those are very good points, though not all of those problems are best solved by manned missions (e.g. exploration can be more efficiently performed if life-support systems are unnecessary). Increasing human survival odds definitely does require manned missions.

But, from a cultural enrichment/learning/individual experience perspective (which I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed the parent comment was referring to) a sufficiently accurate simulation with appropriate man/machine interfaces is a far more efficient solution than manned spaceflight over interstellar distances (provided people can get over their discomfort with the ontology of simulacra).

Don't worry. Our planet will be fucked way before we'll wander anywhere significant. We probably won't even try :)

It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it.
There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.

We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.

aside from being a great visualisation - it's really well annotated

>"We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand."

It is interesting to compare this to what was believed during the dawn of the scientific revolution, eg Isaac Newton's attitude (that the universe was built for humans to understand it). Both positions are speculative, but asserted as facts in their time with far reaching effects.

Interesting that you state Isaac Newton's attitude as fact. When I Google "isaac newton universe built for humans to understand" unquoted, I don't find any support for this statement. In fact, this thread ends up as one of the top hits.

That was more a paraphrase of the impression you get reading him. It was surprisingly difficult to find some kind of quote from him on the intelligibility of nature (it looks like it is one of those topics that has generated a lot of low quality commentary). Here is the closest I could find for now:

>"Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles.[55] These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed man to pursue his own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect himself with his own rational powers.[56]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...

You can also read his principles of philosophy and general scholium to get an idea of his views. You will see he believed in a creator that made the universe as simple as possible:

https://isaacnewton.ca/newtons-general-scholium/

http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/newton-princ.asp

This is perfect -- you yourself seem to think that in order to understand what the post you replied to is saying, all you need to do is google a bunch of words from it. Hypotheses non fingo, indeed.

In Sweden we have a visualization where Ericsson Globe, the worlds largest spherical building, represents the sun: http://www.swedensolarsystem.se/en/

I like how the number 42 is weaved into this.

At 177 light minutes into the journey, there is the following message:

Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.

leaving 4.2E-21 or 0.0000000000000000000042% non-emptiness in the universe.

I can't find any sources backing up this figure, but I wonder if it was the author's intent to smuggle in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.

Edit: Just saw the second reference to this at 208 light minutes.

This is well executed but I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with the genially philosophical textual content and craving the nihilist edition of the same thing. In a way it's a wasted opportunity to generate a day of healthy despair.

"If the proton of a hydrogen atom was the size of the sun on this map, we would need 11 more of these maps to show the average distance to the electron."

Emptiness, both atomic and interstellar, is inconceivably vast.

This would be a lot better if it used vertical scrolling and not sideways scrolling.

The BBC did this site about director James Cameron exploring the depths of the ocean, and I think it works really well with vertical scrolling: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17013285

I think vertical scrolling worked well in that case because it was used to display depth. The information you are displaying is literally about going down. Horizontal scrolling feels more natural to me here because the point is to show how empty and vast the area between planets is.

The downside is that it's an experience that admittedly only works if you're using a trackpad, or a mouse with good side-scrolling support. So people with laptops / trackpad mice are probably okay.

A little known fact seems to be that if you hold Option (or was it command?) on OS X while using the mouse wheel, you scroll horizontally instead of vertically. Found that out by accident.

Another little know fact is that you can go through this map just by holding Right arrow.

This animates smoothly and is pretty fun to scroll on my phone (the text is a bit small, so perhaps a tablet would be better).

Left and right arrow keys also work fine. I had to use them, because the scroll wheel in my mouse doesn't work well.

In space, no one knows which way is down. Vertical scrolling would have worked just fine.

> This would be a lot better if it used vertical scrolling and not sideways scrolling.

Why? Since there is no vertical scrolling your mouse scrolls sideways.

Page Up and Page Down do not work with sideways scrolling, so the keyboard shortcuts aren't as useful as you imagine (it takes ages to scroll using a keyboard) and so accessibility is quite broken.

Use autoscrolling.

In this clever visualization, space is 1702774 pixels wide. At 1366 pixels width of my screen, the printed version would be 1246 screens-long, that is roughly 500 meters (0.3 miles). I am able to scroll horizontally the total screen-width in roughly 200ms, that is, my mouse can travel at 2500 m/s.

I love this.

Here's another visualisation, using a soccer ball and American football pitches. It includes "planet 9", which is a staggering distance away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5VJo5ifdE

I was reading the comments at the top. One said something about 7 months to get to Mars being 2,000 feature-length movies of waking hours. I know its old news, but I remember having a 20MB hard drive back in the day. Now you could easily fit 2000+ movies on one 10TB hard drive that costs less than $500.

That was beautiful. I got one of those auto-of-body moments contemplating life and meaning while scrolling.

...reminds me of the "Overview effect" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

“The fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head sees the world spinning ’round.”

– Beatles, The Fool on the Hill (1967)

The absolute worst thing with this website is thinking that scrolling with your mouse is way too slow, turning on light speed and realising it goes slower.

Well, we're not getting to another solar system in my lifetime, it's fine.

On a phone i scrolled basically as fast as possible all the way to the end, stopping for a few seconds at each dialog, and it was at least a 10 minute ride. I loved the wit along the way!

I would love to be able to print it to scale on A4 paper (with white background of course). Posted on a long wall the results would be very interesting ;-)

If you go to http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/ you can find print-outs of the entire universe all the way to the microwave background (log scale).

They're very cool.

Very cool. One suggestion to give an even better perspective is to... literally give a first person perspective from the planets on what the sun and other planets looks like in the distance. So on Mercury, the sun would look relative large compared to venus, earth, mars, etc.

Something close to this is this video from the perspective of the earth, showing the planets at the same distance from earth to the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw

Speaking of tedious, here is my nitpick ;)

As I was scrolling I stopped to read the little messages about how empty stuff was, etc. Which kind of distorted my view of how far apart things actually were, as my scrolling slowed as I stopped to read them.

Other than that, really cool.

Interesting facts, but they ended up removing me from the experience as well. Maybe I scrolled too fast?

.essay { display: none; }

It's nice to see this again. The revelation that space is so big and empty is one that more people need to see. I especially recommend finding and visiting one of the scale models of the Solar System. I visited and walked the one in Melbourne, Australia.

They are referenced in previous discussions of this particular item. Here are some:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 (178 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 (20 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 (17 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 (11 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 (4 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419190 (3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233679 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876633 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834512 (1 comment)

There are other submissions without any comments - for completeness I thought I'd include those that I could find - there may be others:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13285043

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12870694

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280935

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12273629

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10943525

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240476

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9469999

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728435

Illustrates how amazing it is that we can even detect planets orbiting other stars. Almost like detecting a grain of black sand on a beach of white.

>I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale.

>It's not hard to draw the planets.

>It's the empty space that's the problem.

I had an existential crisis after scrolling 50 times and revealing nothing but more background-color: #000000;

"Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space". True to that.

While this is neat, it scrolls way too slow via mouse and keyboard.

Edit: Ah, autoscrolling works.

this is awesome. It gives a much better idea of scale than any log-based thing.

I loved your comedic quips. Nice job overall!

The moon is actually 2 pixels on my screen

I wanted to read all the snippets of text but didn't have time to scroll through the whole map, so I selected all, copied and pasted.....

#############

That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now.

Pretty empty out here.

Here comes our first planet...

As it turns out, things are pretty far apart.

We’ll be coming up on a new planet soon.

Sit tight.

Most of space is just space.

Halfway home.

Destination: Mars! It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Better be some good in-flight entertainment. In case you're wondering, you'd need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours.

Sit back and relax.

Jupiter is more than 3 times as far as we just traveled.

When are we gonna be there? Seriously.

When are we gonna be there? This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. Too bad they're all too small to appear on this map.

I spy, with my little eye... something black.

If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi/hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth.

All these distances are just averages, mind you. The distance between planets really depends on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun.

So if you're planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map.

If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets.

The New Horizons space craft that launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter.

Don't worry. It'll take a lot less than 13 months to scroll there.

Pretty close to Jupiter now.

Sorry. That was a lie before.

Now we really are pretty close.

Lots of time to think out here...

Pop the champagne! We just passed 1 billion km.

I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale. It's not hard to draw the planets. It's the empty space that's a problem.

Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space.

We're used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this.

When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt...

Those things are too much for our brains to handle.

We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them.

We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers.

Even so, they never seem to work.

Let's try a few metaphors anyway...

You would need 886 of these screens lined up side-by-side to show this whole map at once.

If this map was printed from a quality printer (300 pixels per inch) the earth would be invisible, and the width of the paper would need to be 475 feet.

475 feet is about 1 and 1/2 football fields.

Even though we don’t really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive lengths of time and space. A drop of water can carve out a canyon.

An amoeba can become a dolphin.

A star can collapse on itself.

It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it.

There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.

It’s a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we’d have no point of reference at all.

We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.

All this emptiness really could drive you nuts.

For instance, if you’re in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up.

You see and hear things that aren’t there.

The brain isn't built to handle "empty." "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution.

"What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy.

I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness." Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy of a few select wavelengths.

For everything else, we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real.

The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still...

Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying.

When you hear people talk about how, "there’s more to this universe than our minds can conceive of" it's usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that you're watching late at night when you can’t get to sleep.

Even when Shakespeare wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – he's basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable.

But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of.

The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice.

You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot.

Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring.

Emptiness is actually everywhere.

It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.

Even an atom is mostly empty space.

If the proton of a hydrogen atom was the size of the sun on this map, we would need 11 more of these maps to show the average distance to the electron.

Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty...

but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us.

You could safely say the universe is a "whole lotta nothing." If so much of the universe is made up of emptiness, what does that mean to people like us, living on a tiny speck in the middle of all of it? Is the known universe 99.9999999999999999999958% empty? Or is it 0.0000000000000000000042% full? With so much emptiness, aren't stars, planets, and people just glitches in an otherwise elegant and uniform nothingness, like pieces of lint on a black sweater? But without the tiny dots for it to stretch between, there would be no emptiness to measure, and for that matter, no one around to measure it.

You might say that so much emptiness makes the tiny bits of matter that much more meaningful - simply by the fact that, against all odds, they aren't empty.

If you're drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal.

What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They wouldn't be special at all.

It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time.

Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment.

We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us.

It's reassuring to know that no matter how depressingly bleak or ridiculously momentous we feel, the universe, judging by its current structure, seems well aware of both extremes.

The fact that you're here, in the midst of all this nothing, is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.

Congratulations on making it this far.

Might as well stop now.

We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else.

Simply brilliant!

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