[HN Gopher] Celestia - real-time 3D visualization of space
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       Celestia - real-time 3D visualization of space
        
       Author : belter
       Score  : 4 points
       Date   : 2024-06-09 15:45 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (celestiaproject.space)
 (TXT) w3m dump (celestiaproject.space)
        
       | tithe wrote:
       | One thing that has always unsettled me in these space simulators
       | is the sense of scale.
       | 
       | Yes, the backgrounds I'm staring at don't scale; they're flat,
       | fixed bitmaps due to limitations of the program.
       | 
       | But I let myself forget that sometimes, and the thought that I
       | could keep moving in this direction seemingly _forever_ , and the
       | size of that planet wouldn't change, because the distance is so
       | vast and the size of that planet is so huge and I am so minuscule
       | and my progress is so infinitisemally insignificant, inspires a
       | sense of dread, of strange hopelessness.
       | 
       | I suppose a VR experience would amplify this effect because now
       | you're actually surrounded by this phenomenon: your eyes can
       | perceive old light, _ancient_ light, from places so distant, from
       | objects so incomprehensibly vast, that physically you 'll never
       | be able to reach them nor make any significant progress in
       | reaching.
       | 
       | I used to get this sense in mathematics sometimes when plotting
       | graphs in scales with wild upper and lower bounds, just
       | inconceivably large or small scales, and I could pan right and
       | left and the curve just continues on to infinity (as numbers
       | do..)
       | 
       | Mathematics itself containing the seeds of infinity is probably
       | why I've always approached the subject with a sense of awe, that
       | yes, it's an ingenious system used to model our world, but it
       | contains concepts that have philosophical implications as well as
       | numerical. I'm reminded of John Cleese's character in The Day The
       | Earth Stood Still:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpopz6HxU_w&t=78s
       | 
       | I feel like there's a term for this: dread when confronted with
       | the infinite?
       | 
       | Anyway, time to go outside. The rose bushes are very near so as
       | to be reachable :)
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-09 23:02 UTC)