If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system
I wanted to read all the snippets of text but didn&#x27;t have time to scroll through the whole map, so I selected all, copied and pasted.....<p>#############<p>That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now.<p>Pretty empty out here.<p>Here comes our first planet...<p>As it turns out, things are pretty far apart.<p>We’ll be coming up on a new planet soon.<p>Sit tight.<p>Most of space is just space.<p>Halfway home.<p>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&#x27;re wondering, you&#x27;d need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours.<p>Sit back and relax.<p>Jupiter is more than 3 times as far as we just traveled.<p>When are we gonna be there? Seriously.<p>When are we gonna be there? This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. Too bad they&#x27;re all too small to appear on this map.<p>I spy, with my little eye... something black.<p>If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi&#x2F;hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth.<p>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.<p>So if you&#x27;re planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map.<p>If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets.<p>The New Horizons space craft that launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter.<p>Don&#x27;t worry. It&#x27;ll take a lot less than 13 months to scroll there.<p>Pretty close to Jupiter now.<p>Sorry. That was a lie before.<p>Now we really are pretty close.<p>Lots of time to think out here...<p>Pop the champagne! We just passed 1 billion km.<p>I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren&#x27;t drawn to scale. It&#x27;s not hard to draw the planets. It&#x27;s the empty space that&#x27;s a problem.<p>Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space.<p>We&#x27;re used to dealing with things at a much smaller scale than this.<p>When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt...<p>Those things are too much for our brains to handle.<p>We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them.<p>We&#x27;re always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers.<p>Even so, they never seem to work.<p>Let&#x27;s try a few metaphors anyway...<p>You would need 886 of these screens lined up side-by-side to show this whole map at once.<p>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.<p>475 feet is about 1 and 1&#x2F;2 football fields.<p>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.<p>An amoeba can become a dolphin.<p>A star can collapse on itself.<p>It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it.<p>There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.<p>It’s a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we’d have no point of reference at all.<p>We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.<p>All this emptiness really could drive you nuts.<p>For instance, if you’re in a sensory deprivation tank for too long, your brain starts to make things up.<p>You see and hear things that aren’t there.<p>The brain isn&#x27;t built to handle &quot;empty.&quot; &quot;Sorry, Humanity,&quot; says Evolution.<p>&quot;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.<p>I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness.&quot; Neurologically speaking, we really only deal with matter of a certain size, and energy of a few select wavelengths.<p>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.<p>The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still...<p>Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying.<p>When you hear people talk about how, &quot;there’s more to this universe than our minds can conceive of&quot; it&#x27;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&#x27;re watching late at night when you can’t get to sleep.<p>Even when Shakespeare wrote: &quot;There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – he&#x27;s basically trying to give us a loophole to make the ghost in the story more believable.<p>But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of.<p>The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice.<p>You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot.<p>Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring.<p>Emptiness is actually everywhere.<p>It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.<p>Even an atom is mostly empty space.<p>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.<p>Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty...<p>but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us.<p>You could safely say the universe is a &quot;whole lotta nothing.&quot; 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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t empty.<p>If you&#x27;re drowning in the middle of the ocean, a floating piece of driftwood is a pretty big deal.<p>What if trillions of stars and planets were crammed right next to each other? They wouldn&#x27;t be special at all.<p>It seems like we are both pathetically insignificant, and miraculously important at the same time.<p>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.<p>We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us.<p>It&#x27;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.<p>The fact that you&#x27;re here, in the midst of all this nothing, is pretty amazing when you stop and think about it.<p>Congratulations on making it this far.<p>Might as well stop now.<p>We&#x27;ll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else.