If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) | Hacker News Reader

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)

joshworth.com

422 pointsbrycehalley82 comments

That is a fantastic visualization to get a feeling of the scales involved.

It reminds me a lot of the "planet trail" next to Zurich, Switzerland, a trail with scale models of the sun and the planets [1]. The sun is about 1m in diameter. The earth is about 1cm in diameter, 100 or 200m away. Pluto is more than 3km down the path. Walking down that trail was the first time I realized how empty the solar system really is, and how far the giant planets really are. I highly recommend it to anyone having the opportunity, particularly with children. It gives you the same feeling of emptiness, with views of the Alps.

[1] https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/sport/planet-trail

Here's the Melbourne Australia version: http://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/So...

I'd prefer a view of the Alps - but a view of the beach isn't too bad.

Here's a video of something similar where they constructed a scale model of the universe in the desert: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE

Sweden packed the inner four planets into Stockholm, with Pluto ending up 300km away. :) The newer dwarf planets and the depiction of the termination shock however let the model expand all the way up to Kiruna.

https://twistedsifter.com/2014/10/the-sweden-solar-system-sc...

That's really cool! I recently stumbled on that installations Halley's Comet here in Skövde :)

Planet Nine would be an interesting addition here.

There is also a land art installation at the scale of 1:200,000,000 in Norway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Lofoten

Also there is a 1:680 000 000 one in Zagreb, Croatia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Views

I was about to write how there is also a planet trail in Göttingen, Germany - but it turns out that there are a LOT of these trails scattered throughout Germany (List in German only [1])

Back in my youth I did not follow this trail actively, but I found it mind-boggling just how far apart from one another I would stumble over one of the planets.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenweg#Deutschland

The world's largest scale model of the solar system is in Sweden and stretches along most of the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

I live in Stockholm (close to the sun!) and never knew any of this – thank you so much for sharing, this is awesome!

There's also one in Munich, starting at the Deutsches Museum and ending at the Zoo (~ 5 km): https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/natural-scien...

Yet another one - on a smaller scale on the sea front in Ventnor - Isle of Wight, UK:

http://stokeywalk.blogspot.com/2015/12/launching-solar-syste...

There is the Otford Solar System in Kent, England which claims to be the largest in the world:

http://www.solarsystem.otford.info/

There's one of these in Eau Claire, WI, where I went to college [0]. I used to live across the bike trail from the sun, so I made the walk several times. Always blew my mind.

[0] https://www.visiteauclaire.com/listing/eau-claire-planet-wal...

There's 10 Km one between York (England) and Selby, a cycle path. I had a tyre puncture near Pluto...

Just to add to the cacophony, there is one between Gif-sur-Yvette and Bures-sur-Yvette, Paris area. Its a nice walk for anyone close to the Paris-Saclay research center.

There's a 40 mile (64 km) model in rural Maine (Route 1 in Aroostook County). The webpage claims it is the largest in the world (obviously not true, at least not as of today). The webpage is also delightfully early-90s-esque. http://pages.umpi.edu/nmms/solar/

Edit: There's a youtube video where some guys made a revolving (but temporary) to-scale model in the desert. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4524AAZdE

There's one in Ithaca, NY too: http://www.sciencenter.org/sagan-walk.html

York reporting in: https://www.york.ac.uk/solar/

I used to think of space as big and empty - and indeed, this map invokes that feeling a little. But since reading "Out of the Silent Planet" I have come to see it a different way.

He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name 'Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.

> Out of the Silence Planet (C.S. Lewis)

Atoms are mostly empty space too. Distance between electrons and the nucleus is substantially larger than the "size" of the nucleus.

A "fly in a cathedral" being the analogy that stuck in my memory.

It's a beautiful excerpt, thanks for sharing. Though I can't help but feel that the author's allegory fits a nebula better than "plain" space.

Even a nebula is absurdly empty. A particularly dense nebula might have ~10k particles per cubic centimeter floating around in it. Even that is vastly more empty than the vacuum we create inside particle accelerators and such.

Wow. Really? I would have thought that our artificial vacuum is pretty empty... Any good read on the topic?

I'm not an expert in this area at all, so I pulled that comparison out of a few different articles and wikipedia.

According to [1], the pressure inside the LHC is somewhere between 10^-11 and 10^-10 mbar. That's between 10^-9 and 10^-8 Pascals. CERN also says that it's "a vacuum almost as rarefied as that found on the surface of the Moon." According to [2], pressure on the surface of the moon is between 4x10^-11 and 8x10^-10 Pa. The upper limit is quite close to 10^-9 Pa, so let's say that CERN can manage 10^-9 Pa on a good day.

According to [3], the inside of a nebula is 100-10k times more dense than general interstellar medium. (The "10k particles per cubic cm" figure also comes from the same page.) According to [2], interstellar medium in the Milky Way averages between 10^-15 and 10^-14 Pa. So the pressure inside a nebula should be between 10^-13 and 10^-10 Pa. Another comparison using the number of particles per cubic cm [3] yields a figure between 10^-14 and 10^-12 Pa. The difference is probably due to temperature, but anyway both results are significantly less than the LHC.

We can probably make better vacuums on a smaller scale, though.

[1] https://home.cern/science/engineering/vacuum-empty-interstel...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(pressure)

[3] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26326/how-dense-...

Absolutely beautiful, thank you for sharing.

Are there functions which would map space to relatively smaller regions that could give us a different perspective on our universe? For instance, what would a starmap look like with each region of space scaled by its gravitational flux?

Often I think the study and exploration of space should be the primary focus of our entire civilization, or species even. It makes most everything we focus on seem trivial to me. But then I think maybe that's just because I liked Star Trek: TNG so much.

Fantastic. I especially liked the speed of light button. One of the interesting things I originally missed because I eventually used the shortcut buttons was this gem (from the source code):

> "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"

Wow!

I have seen atleast a dozen webpages trying to show how the space scale works, and this one by far is the best.

The light speed button on bottom right corner just blew my mind, I was expecting it to be faster than my scroll speed, it is a fraction of that. Then I remembered it takes freaking 8 minutes 20 seconds for light to reach earth, it took me 15 seconds to scroll that.

Talk about scrolling faster than the speed of light ;)

Awesome... If you want to scroll some more after that, why not dive deep here: https://neal.fun/deep-sea/.

I wish you could right-click and open videos in a tab from the various things on the way downward. There were lots of creatures I've never heard of, and plenty of cool videos on Youtube about them.

Spent more than an hour on the decent. Quite a worthwhile and adventuresome web page.

In fact, that guy's homepage has a lot of interesting stuff! https://neal.fun/

The Size of Space is pretty cool, too, and related:

https://neal.fun/size-of-space/

A thread from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423

Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690

Click the button in the bottom right and it moves at light speed.

Which, it turns out is really, really slow. Big revelation to me!

Actually it is really really fast relative to speeds we are familiar with in our lives. Space is just so big that it makes the speed of light (c) feel slow.

Even on Earth, c is slow and it's pretty inconvenient. We wouldn't have to worry too much about which edge location a resource is served from if intercontinental latencies were on the order of 100 microseconds instead of 100 milliseconds.

this video[1] by Dr James O'Donoghue really made me stop and consider how slow the fastest possible speed is, relative to the awesome vastness of space. I mean how many people have actually paused for 8:20 mins and thought, "wow that's a really long time for light to arrive from that star that seems like a stone's throw away!"

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9D5tSbxudQ

Here's my favorite version of the same idea; it's a bit more immersive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmXK1eRo0Q

It usually only takes about 15 secs for people to go "wow, that doesn't seem very fast at all."

Daughter made a scale model of the solar system, similar dimensions as OP's but physically rendered. Sun to Neptune was 1km. https://youtu.be/-fPm5mj0Bhg

Speaking of pixel measurement of the moon: According to CSS, the moon is 24.3 pixels wide [1], due to the fact that pixels are display-density-independent.

[1]: http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx

That’s cute, but not true. The author mixed up px units with the reference pixel definition. A px unit is defined by CSS to be 1/96th of an inch, it is not an angular measurement.

What is true is that if you make a CSS moon 24.3 px wide and display it on a page with no zoom, on a monitor with 96 device pixels per inch, and view it from 28 inches away, then the size of the moon on your screen should be approximately the same size as the moon in the sky.

I don't think we could ever grasp this distance in our heads or that we need to. But I'm getting a lot of questions on how strong the gravitational pull of the sun is to hold all these together!! Also the insane engineering in the telescopes!! Mindblowing!!

I have been looking at notebooks for so long that when I finally scrolled to Jupiter, I thought, "That's misspelled".

Cool site! Just one thing, my hand hurts from endlessly scrolling the scroll wheel. It takes about 5 seconds of scrolling to scroll past the sun. Has this been designed for Apple trackpads?

That seems to be the point from reading the reassuring texts that you soon are there. Press the planet signs to cheat.

I really like the "This is how fast light travels"-button. Splendid demo.

You didn't try pressing the -> arrow key? That works and scrolls very smoothly.

Good use for free spinning scroll wheels.

I wish the little planet icons at the top of the page had a little dot moving underneath them to show where you are right now.

The text was amusing and worth reading up through Saturn, then it tried to get deep and turned into philosophical naval gazing about our insignificance. I wish there was a way to turn the text off, though at the speeds I was scrolling the words could not be read anyway.

Still, a fantastic visualization tool.

That's when I used control-F. (Or command-F for the Apple folks.)

Visual aids for education are invaluable and garner interest from adults and children alike. The English Village I like in has a scale solar system in the park.

http://www.solarsystem.otford.info/

The scale includes adjacent stars. This means there are partner locations as far afield as LA, Sydney and The Falklands!

http://www.solarsystem.otford.info/nearest-stars/4544490779

My children are fascinated.

Awesome! Just awesome.

One of the first "discoveries" I made is how much bigger the distances to the outer planets are and how much their spacing geometrically increases. That's never been obvious to me before.

Thank you.

Woah super cool!

With my Logitech MX Master free-scrolling, I could go way faster than C.

Right, but I had to first click the mouse wheel to switch to fluid scrolling :)

I find it amazing on how far we are, how "small" the Sun is, and how much energy we get from it at such distance. It's really incredible how much energy it produces.

I want to draw your attention to Mercury. See how far out it is from the sun. Now consider the fact that orbital cycle calculations were never summing up right with classical laws. The error was consistently repeatable. With curvature of space included, the error disappeared. Look at the distance till which the influence of the sun is, that leaves us unsatisfied with our results!

Asimov had a great factual article based on that point: "The Planet that Wasn't"

http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm

[A favourite of mine as it was the first 'adult' science article I read when I was a very young kid].

I remember seeking out the Asimov non-fiction science books at my local library when I was a teenager. Even then they were dated, but still fascinating.

After scrolling for like 20 minutes or so, the most interesting part is to realize how empty is the outer part of the map (75% of the total distance comprises just neptune, uranus and pluto). Even if we would be able to escape to mars or even jupiter, to colonise further and escape of the solar system would be really, really hard.

An image of all the solar bodies from that site in close proximity to each other: https://imgur.com/a/dOLVu5m

From the perspective of someone on earth, the sun would be around one pixel too, which I think is an amazing feature/coincidence.

There is a name for this kind of relative size, but I forgot how it is called.

Angular size?

Yes!

Here is a list with several of them:

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

"You are here"

How do you know?

They traced your IP address.

Pretty good visualization, which gives a better proportional feeling about orbits than charts which distort proportions. Try scrolling from Mars to Jupiter.

This is amazing. It's hard not to be humbled upon realizing just how small and insignificant we are in the scheme of things.

It's almost an existential horror. At the same time, I wonder if the same applies when you try the same thing at a much lower order of magnitude.

From the perspective of light, eight minutes from the sun to Earth is a trip to the local shop. 7-ish hours to Pluto is a flight across the Atlantic or a rush-hour drive from Manchester to London. By that logic, the distances are only impossible because we don't live long enough to know what it's like.

What if you go smaller? What is the space between one land an another for a bird migrating south for the winter, looking down at nothing but blue and up but nothing but a different blue? What about the space between one bacterium and the next? Or the distance between an atom and its orbiting electron from the perspective of the atom?

What if you take it further and look at your connection to other people as your own gravitational pull? You might have gone through a fair bit of nothingness before you found them.

The infinite possibilities of the universe.

Being small doesn’t necessarily make you insignificant. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but a vast quantity of completely empty space shouldn’t make you feel that way. It’s empty! Some big rocks? Chunks of ice? Clouds of gas? Who cares?

More terrifying, if you ask me, is the possibility that out of all this stuff we might very well be the only significant thing in all of it.

Oooh, sneaky opening for a moral debate.

Is anything in the universe worthy of moral consideration, absent of life?

Anyone who is involved in a serious pursuit of science - especially cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists - has this same feeling of the inescapable insignificance. I'm not saying as a matter of reality that we are insignificant, but to feel that we might be the only significant thing in all of it strikes me as strange. To me, the normal reaction to discovering that the geocentric model is false and that we are part of a huge galaxy which is itself part of an infinite number of galaxies, etc etc should fill a person with a healthy sense of "wow, look at the vastness of the universe and how small we are in all of it." You're right that small doesn't mean insignificant, but the feeling of relative insignificance still seems inescapable to me and being small in the scheme of things is something that hits the emotions in a powerful way. The vastness of the universe should instill some humility I think.

This is actually nice, although I had to dig into the source code to read his essay, was too tired of scrolling.

Amazing work. Love it. Curious to know, how this horizonal scroll is working. Is it virtual scroll

Love it! Is little experiments like this... That still keep me on the internet!

Bookmarked. I love those kinds of sites. It really got me into the experience

As nice as this awesome page is, the source code also looks excellent.

view-source:https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

Looks like the whole thing was hand-written with love.

"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."

Please, ditch the 'deep shower thoughts'.

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