Following on after yesterday’s post, I thought I’d share this.
I tried to point out that our Galaxy alone is so vast that we could travel for the rest of time and probably never get to all the corners of it. I don’t think that puts it in enough perspective.
Perhaps Douglas Adams might be a little more relatable. In the beginning of his altogether truly caliwandalous book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, he has this to say –
“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Yet, even this doesn’t really encapsulate just how large the Galaxy is. Large, and empty.
You could cram all the worlds in the Star Wars tales in one corner of our Galaxy, all the worlds in the Star Trek tales in another corner of the Galaxy, all the worlds in the Stargate tales in another corner of the Galaxy, and you’d still have enough room left over for BattleStar Galactica, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, Battle Beyond The Stars, and a few others.
I think we need something else to show the scale of the Galaxy. Something that shows the scale of something more local, like our own solar system.
Enter If The Moon Were A Pixel. If you made our Moon the size of a pixel on a computer screen, and by comparison everything else in our solar system done to scale, you’d get this site. You can scroll to see just how far apart the planets in our system are. Go check it out. You’ll be scrolling for a while. (Hint: use the arrow buttons instead. Less muscle strain on your fingers than scrolling.)
Thanks to Mike Lucas (https://storyrunner.houseoflucas.com/) for pointing this out to me.
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