[HN Gopher] If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate ...
___________________________________________________________________
If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system
model (2014)
Author : sdoering
Score : 858 points
Date : 2025-06-13 08:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (joshworth.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joshworth.com)
| andersco wrote:
| Still an extraordinary experience after all these years and
| possibly the best use of horizontal scrolling I've seen. Lots of
| previous discussions and posts on HN:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=if+moon+only+1+pixel
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's very very good! I thought this one hit hard though, I
| assume inspired by the moon = 1-pixel viz.
|
| https://hmijail.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
| zurfer wrote:
| that's a great share, I feel like it would also benefit from
| setting the "speed of light", as something like median
| average yearly income.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This is great, but it needs an update: wealth inequality is
| even higher today than it was when that site was created.
|
| E.g. it gives Jeff Bezos's net worth as $139 billion, but
| today it's $228 billion.
| athenot wrote:
| On the same note: https://xkcd.com/980/ (from 2011 when Bezos
| "only" had $18b)
| amelius wrote:
| Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right.
|
| Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach.
|
| I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And
| maybe that'll be enough.
| beklein wrote:
| Maybe light's insanely fast and space is just huge. It's all
| relative ;)
| isolli wrote:
| I would say they're two sides of the same coin. The time it
| takes for light to travel the universe (which makes
| communication even with nearby stars essentially impossible)
| is what makes the universe huge.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Luckily FTL communication isn't actually impossible and
| special relativity only applies to energy and mass.
| krapp wrote:
| FTL communication is actually impossible, what are you
| talking about?
| jordigh wrote:
| I can't tell if you're joking or if you know something
| nobody else does.
|
| As far as I know, anything going faster than the speed of
| causality violates causality. So what are you talking
| about?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > violates causality
|
| But we don't know that casualty is a law of physics, do
| we?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Only inasmuch as we don't know that gravity and the
| Strong Nuclear Force aren't.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Don't conflate causality and special relativity.
|
| SR breaks down at both ends of the spectrum, at the event
| horizon of black holes and in Bose Einstein condensates.
| That proves that it is an emergent property of
| observations, statistical behavior of decoherent systems,
| and not a universal law.
| munksbeer wrote:
| > Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach.
|
| Yes, agreed. I find it a little depressing. An unimaginably
| huge universe, tantalisingly there, but completely out of
| reach.
| once_inc wrote:
| Assuming our models of the universe are correct, and faster
| than light travel is impossible. There are very strong
| reasons to believe this, but perhaps we can cheat by
| stretching and compressing space around us.
| nurettin wrote:
| Meh, most of it is just more of the same thing. I'd rather
| play with a paper plane than float in space.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| It's not the destination, it's the journey :)
| ant6n wrote:
| 10,000 years of empty space to get to the next solar
| system. Exciting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Plenty of time for reflection on one's choices in life
| that put them in that situation.
| ant6n wrote:
| Especially generation 143 of 330, they can definitely
| spend their whole life on that reflection.
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Speaking of which, Peter Watts' Sunflower Series has a
| great and short enough hard-ish scifi story about just
| such a ship.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| Not with light speed travel. At even 1% the speed of
| light, the travel time diminishes significantly:
|
| - Titan, Io and Ganymede are only 2.5 days away - Pluto
| is about 23 days
|
| Edit: Even at such speeds, we still can't visit a nearby
| star system in a reasonable time-frame. Oh well.
| Reubachi wrote:
| As time passes, the universe is expanding infinitely in
| every direction from every point.
|
| Even if we could travel at 1 percent the speed of light,
| the "destination" would be inflating away from us at much
| greater relatavistic speed.
|
| To your point, this is less an issue with solar or extra
| solar objects.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Doesn't this depend on the initial distance to the
| destination? I'm thinking you have to be going ~140M
| light-years for cosmic expansion to exceed 1%c, and
| Proxima Centauri is only ~4 light-years away
| Sharlin wrote:
| Traveling at .1c within the solar system wouldn't really
| be feasible due to the need to accelerate and decelerate.
| Not for meatbag ships anyway.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There's nothing about 0.1c or even 0.999c travel that's
| detrimental to meatbags. They would both feel exactly the
| same to the traveler. If your (for now) imaginary rocket
| could accelerate at a constant, gentle 1G, you could
| reach 0.1c in about a month (traveler's time), and you
| could reach 0.999c in about 44 months. Building and
| fueling such a rocket is the hard part.
| Sharlin wrote:
| My point was that the GP talked about flight times
| assuming instantaneous acceleration and deceleration.
| Also, 1G of acceleration sustained over a month is more
| or less impossible for meatbag-sized spacecraft,
| _especially_ if you need to also accelerate all the fuel
| you'll need to decelerate. The rocket equation is simply
| way too brutal. Something like nuclear pulse propulsion
| might come close. Or antimatter propulsion if we'll ever
| be able to create and store entire moles worth of
| antimatter.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| It depends on how you define the bounds of the Solar
| System, but eg. a flight from Pluto at its most distant
| to the same distance on the opposite side of the sun that
| hits .1C at peak needs ~5G for the entire duration. And
| it seems quite wasteful to bother getting up to speed
| before immediately reversing the acceleration.
|
| If you're travelling between points in the Oort Cloud, 1G
| should be more than sufficient to hit .1c on the trip.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| We can instead happily drive our solar system in a
| different direction by nudging the sun.
|
| At this point in humanity's history, I think that's more
| feasible than high speed traveling.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Not out of reach if you get very close to light speed. Time
| would advance very slowly for you, so counterintuitively it
| is possible to travel 5000ly in your life time.
|
| Although for everyone else at least 5000 years will pass, so
| better say goodbye to family and friend.
|
| Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing...
|
| Also light isn't slow. A photon instantly travels to the end
| of time and yet it still takes a few minutes from the surface
| of the sun to us. Or about 100000 years from the center of
| the sun to its surface.
| amne wrote:
| How would that feel as a traveler? Does all motion slow
| down to a crawl, all sub-atomic particles just "freeze" and
| essentially your thoughts and body aging too? So it would
| seem like you got there in an instant?
|
| For sure you're not just sitting there watching people get
| born, live and die in second and shrugging your shoulders.
| Sharlin wrote:
| You'd feel nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. The
| starscape outside the ship would look strange though,
| shrinking into a small, blueshifted patch of sky straight
| ahead, while stars behind you would redshift out of the
| visible range. Everything moving at very low speeds
| relative to you would indeed appear to happen really
| fast.
| amelius wrote:
| What are the chances of hitting a small meteorite or part
| of it, traveling now at relativistic speeds wrt you?
| kqr wrote:
| Extremely low. Space is very empty.
| brazzy wrote:
| But it's also very _big_ , and GP doesn't even specify
| how far of a trip they're asking about nor how small a
| meteorite.
|
| "Extremely" and "very" don't cut it here. This is beyond
| the human ability to guess. You'd actually do at least
| some back-of-the-napkin math to give a real answer, and
| with a far enough trip, the answer may well become
| "Almost 100%".
| wat10000 wrote:
| And at a high enough speed, the impacts from the ~1
| hydrogen atom per cm^3 in interstellar space become a
| major problem.
| amelius wrote:
| How far a trip: maybe start with the nearest star.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's one of those cases where you have very small numbers
| multiplied by very large ones. The actual risk is hard to
| intuit because there are so many orders of magnitude
| involved in both directions.
|
| In any case it's probably a moot concern as long as we
| are living under the twin tyrannies of Newtons Third Law
| and the Rocket Equation. Building a rocket that can
| accelerate constantly and noticeably for weeks, months,
| or even years on end in order to accelerate up to a
| velocity where Relativity starts to matter requires an
| absurdly large rocket. Like converting the mass of
| Jupiter into rocket fuel to make it to the next habitable
| solar system in a couple of centuries level of craziness.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Micrometer-scale dust particles would in fact hit you all
| the time. And they'd absolutely mess up your ship over
| time without a lot of shielding.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's about one particle of dust per million cubic
| metres. c is about 300 million metres/second. So even at
| 0.5c that's still a lot of particle collisions per
| second, each having significant kinetic energy.
|
| Basically it would be like flying through explosive
| sandpaper. Each dust particle would be reduced to plasma,
| which creates problems of its own.
|
| If you're accelerating there's also the Unruh Effect,
| which will raise the perceived temperature. By a lot.
|
| There's no way to make this work with any kind of
| engineering we know about today.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| The Unruh effect is theoretical, and no evidence at all
| has ever been found that it's real. It literally exists
| as nothing more than a hypothetical mathematical model,
| that also happens to be debated by others who know enough
| to effectively debate it, and disagree.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Micrometer-scale specks of dust would hit you like they
| were armor piercing tank gun rounds. The usual shielding
| proposed is ice. Lots of ice.
| folli wrote:
| Why ice?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Mostly that it's plentiful, ablative, expendable, plus
| good radiation shielding (yeah, cosmic ray protons are
| really going to mess things up at relativistic speeds too
| unless there's enough mass to stop them).
| rnjesus wrote:
| zero if you hit that spice first
| seanw444 wrote:
| If the light behind you redshifts out of the visible
| spectrum, would the light in front of you blueshift into
| dangerous territory? X-rays, gamma rays, etc?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Yes. To some degree.
| doph wrote:
| Yes, and this provides a nice intuition about the
| relation of wavelength to energy. But x and g wavelengths
| are several oom shorter than visible light, so you'd have
| to be traveling at very close to c to experience that
| amount of Doppler shift.
| thombat wrote:
| But unless you have a way of slowing down again you'll
| never see anything of your destination, just the briefest
| of flares of light as you sail past. And if you do have a
| way that involves anything like physics that we recognise,
| you've brought along a huge rest mass that then got
| accelerated to near light speed. Probably your civilization
| needs to be approaching Kardashev Level 2 to pull this off.
| causal wrote:
| Yeah if you have a body that can tolerate sudden jumps
| between reference frames you could pretty much explore the
| entire galaxy trivially, so long as you don't mind that few
| places will stay the same long enough to visit twice.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You wouldn't need a sudden jump. If you had a rocket that
| accelerated at a pleasant 1G forever, you could reach and
| stop at the center of the milky way in about 20 (your
| time) years, and you could reach and stop at the
| Andromeda galaxy in about 28 years. Play around with some
| of the online space travel relativity calculators--it's
| wild!
|
| Of course building and fueling such a rocket is what's
| totally out of reach.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > Of course building and fueling such a rocket is what's
| totally out of reach.
|
| We'd need a device that could efficiently transform
| several kg of matter to photons.
| widforss wrote:
| And back?
| lukan wrote:
| Also some kind of a energy shield. Space is pretty empty,
| but if you go fast enough, you will still hit lots of non
| empty space.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Is there drag in space? I.e. would you need increasing
| energy to accelerate at a constant rate as the speed goes
| up?
| dmoy wrote:
| I guess one assumes that whatever system prevents you
| from getting hulled by space dust also removes the drag
| from the equation?
| ryandrake wrote:
| With a traditional rocket, I believe you'd need
| decreasing energy to maintain the same acceleration as
| the flight progressed, since you are carrying along with
| you and burning the fuel, and so the total mass (payload
| + fuel) that needs to be accelerated is constantly
| decreasing.
|
| Of course there's the pesky problem that for every N kg
| of mass you want to accelerate at 1G for that kind of a
| trip, you're probably going to need somewhere on the
| order of N billion kg of fuel to burn.
| mock-possum wrote:
| That doesn't make sense - if you were traveling at the
| speed of light, it would take you 5000 years to travel
| 5000ly - longer if you were just 'very close' to C. Time
| wouldn't advance slowly for you, it wouldn't advance
| perceptively different at all - you'd still live every
| second of those 5000 years.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| I dont think you are right. Light for example doesnt
| perceive time at all. From the photons point of view it
| never aged even a microsecond while it traveled
| lightyears. Time is relative too so from our POV 1 year
| passed when a photon traveled 1 ly, but for the photon no
| time passed.
| zwily wrote:
| Read up on time dilation and special relativity. Time
| absolutely does pass slower for you as you accelerate.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| You two are talking about different meanings of "time".
|
| Traveling 5,000 LY at 0.5 c will cause you the spaceship
| pilot to age 20,000 years. It's non-relativistic, inside
| that inertial frame. Clock second hands still sweep slow
| but noticeable circles.
|
| Meanwhile, everyone outside of the spaceship is happening
| FAST, by your observations. You'll see stars turn red and
| go supernova.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The journey will take 10,000 years for an external
| stationary observer and about 8695 years for the pilot.
| danudey wrote:
| It depends on acceleration though. If acceleration and
| deceleration take long enough, it could take an entire
| generation to get up to a fast enough speed that
| relativistic effects make any difference, and another
| generation to slow down enough to interact with anything
| you might see.
|
| Plus if you're traveling at near light speed, running into
| any matter at all would be pretty devastating for whatever
| craft you're in.
|
| Edit: someone further down claimed that the math says that
| accelerating at 1G would get you to 0.1c in a month, so
| that's actually not that bad all in all. I still maintain
| that hitting any matter at those speeds might be
| unpleasant.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > that accelerating at 1G would get you to 0.1c in a
| month
|
| Minor problem is that we don't have any technology that's
| close to capable of that. And at 0.1c relativistic
| effects are barely noticeable.
| eslaught wrote:
| One thing I've always wondered is what fraction of c is
| actually realistically achievable with current
| technologies? (Maybe with scenarios for manned/unmanned
| spacecraft.)
|
| Like are we at 0.1% or 0.01% or more orders of magnitude
| off?
| Scarblac wrote:
| According to the first Google hit,
| https://scitechdaily.com/nasas-parker-solar-probe-the-
| fastes... , the fastest we've made so far went 430k mph
| (falling towards the sun), or about 0.064% of c. Good
| guess.
| anon_cow1111 wrote:
| We have a number! Around 0.1c maximum and unsurprisingly
| it involves using nuclear bombs to push yourself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_prop
| uls...
| btilly wrote:
| If you enjoy such questions, I highly recommend
| https://www.amazon.com/Indistinguishable-Magic-Robert-L-
| Forw....
|
| The best speed for interstellar travel with technologies
| that current theory says should be within our reach can
| be achieved with a vehicle with a light sail pushed by a
| giant laser, that is powered by solar power. There is
| even a way to brake it when it reaches the target star. I
| forget what the predicted velocity was though.
|
| This technology is basically the same as one that the
| Moties developed in the story, _The Mote in God 's Eye_.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Slow down by pulling on the fishing line tied to the back
| of it, carefully.
| btilly wrote:
| It slows down by releasing a large light sail in front of
| it, designed to reflect light back to a much smaller
| light sail behind it. The laser then pushes the large
| sail away, and as the sail goes it pushes the smaller
| sail (and ship) back. This leaves the ship at moderate
| speed relative to the new star, and a large sail
| traveling very, very quickly beyond it.
|
| We do not yet have this technology. But we can show that
| it is plausible.
| nilamo wrote:
| > Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing...
|
| A starship capable of such a journey is surely large enough
| to bring all your friends and family along, colony-ship
| style.
| tanewishly wrote:
| We're already on that starship. Our engine is about 8
| lightminutes away. All we need is to figure out how to
| steer this thing - and how to not wreck it while en
| route.
| lukan wrote:
| I would prefer the concept of people building an
| artificial planet/asteroid/spaceship for a starship,
| instead of messing with our star system. But luckily that
| debate is some years away and currently we cannot even
| figure out, how to deal with some increased CO2 levels.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| > _" A photon instantly travels to the end of time"_
|
| Please explain this. TIA
| tridentboy wrote:
| First set gamma as being 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2), with "c"
| being the speed of light. The factor for time dilation
| and distance contraction in special relativity is gamma
| and 1/gamma respectively.
|
| That means that when you get to speeds equal to c, your
| time runs infinitely slower and the distances are
| infinitely shorter. So if your clock is infinitely
| slower, so every travel at "c" speeds means that no time
| passes for you. And if your distances are infinitely
| shorter, all travels at "c" speeds cover any distance as
| immediate. So you could reach every point of the universe
| as if it was immediately closer and in no time at all.
|
| So in the frame of reference of the photon, the moment it
| is created it has already reached its destination, be it
| wherever it is on the universe.
|
| Of course we can never reach "c" as beings with mass, but
| we can get closer to that. So for example if you get to
| 99.99999999999999% of the speed of light, you could
| travel a distance of 54,794,520 ly and only one year
| would pass to you, while 54,794,520 years would pass on
| earth.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| thanks, great explanation
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Follow up question from someone who's mostly forgotten
| his university physics.
|
| Do photons actually exist, in the traditional sense of
| physical matter.
|
| Or are they just a convenient short hand to describe the
| transfer of energy via waves in the fabric or space time,
| if they dont experience the universe when passing through
| it but only when interacting with matter and matters
| "dents" in space-time.
| svachalek wrote:
| As a non-physicist, my understanding is that they
| actually exist, but can't be thought of as flying around
| like ping pong balls. I think it's one of those things
| that comes down to interpretation though, where the math
| is very clear but how you think of what it "means" lies
| beyond science.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform
| interstellar travel? I used to imagine a spaceship being
| alive, with people inside being analogous to "cells" in a
| multicellular organism.
|
| Perhaps this is really how AI achieves consciousness?
| kqr wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_ship
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| To make a generation ship work you have to build a self-
| contained ecology that is stable and self-repairing,
| inside mechanical and software systems that are fault
| tolerant and either extremely redundant or self-
| repairing, run by a political and social system that is
| also fault-tolerant and self-repairing.
|
| We know how to do exactly zero of those things.
| danudey wrote:
| There's a CRPG I've been meaning to play where this is
| basically the plot; there was a generation ship, it was
| heading towards some planet or another, but the social
| and political structure on the ship broke down at some
| point and now there's no one actually in charge, the ship
| is getting run down, and they probably blew past their
| destination a hundred years ago if they were even still
| on course at all.
|
| I remember someone pointing out that a generation ship
| could be problematic because you have one generation who
| decides to launch this expedition but will never see the
| end, multiple generations who didn't choose this life and
| won't get to see the benefits, and then one generation
| who actually gets to the planet but might not even want
| to be there. Without some kind of cryogenic sleep or
| relativistic speeds the whole thing might fall apart just
| because most of the people involved "didn't sign up for
| this" but they have to toil away anyway for someone else
| to benefit from it.
| datameta wrote:
| What of the "just so" attitude of a child growing up?
| Everything is taken at face value, there is no
| comparison, only stories (unless you have a catalogue of
| 30EB of 8K earth footage or something to that effect for
| them to fawn over). They don't have the reference frame
| for other situations for a while, perhaps long enough to
| not be able to see things differently?
|
| This makes me think of multi-generational migrations
| north out of Africa. There's only so much that can be
| passed orally losslessly. Eventually the group in north
| siberia after 20K years doesn't see living any other way.
| silverquiet wrote:
| > I remember someone pointing out that a generation ship
| could be problematic because you have one generation who
| decides to launch this expedition but will never see the
| end, multiple generations who didn't choose this life and
| won't get to see the benefits, and then one generation
| who actually gets to the planet but might not even want
| to be there.
|
| That isn't really different from the way things are now.
| We are, in fact, traveling through the galaxy for many
| generations and none of us signed up for it. We just
| happen to be on a largeish ship and have no destination.
| jandrese wrote:
| More to the point the ship needs to be absolutely self
| sufficient, it can't even use solar power and has no
| access to outside mass whatsoever. But if you have a ship
| like this you could build an orbital habitat using the
| same technology, and it would be much much easier to
| build since it doesn't have to accelerate, can use solar
| power, and has access to the rest of the resources of a
| solar system.
|
| If you have all of this why would you go to the enormous
| extra effort to move the habitat to a different solar
| system? Even if your civilization is so old that the star
| is a dim brown dwarf that's still plenty of energy for
| day to day life.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > run by a political and social system that is also
| fault-tolerant and self-repairing
|
| That's the point of the AI; it would generally replace
| that.
| tanewishly wrote:
| Well, to be frank, we currently have such a ship, but
| we're doing quite a lot to disrupt its capability of
| sustaining human life.
|
| Of course, even if we stopped doing that, we'd need to
| figure out how to visit another place if our ship is
| passing close by. That also seems to pose a problem: both
| Voyagers are barely out of the exhaust fumes of our
| ship's motor, and getting so far took ~40 years.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform
| interstellar travel?
|
| That's essentially the premise of Project Hail Mary. Good
| book.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| It's a wonderfully entertaining book and for that reason
| I loved it, but Andy Weir really, really glosses over and
| hand-waves away all kinds of other difficulties for so
| quickly and easily building a ship that can travel at
| nearly the speed of light.
|
| He basically just has it work because the fuel
| difficulties are solved and bam, the main character can
| zip around nearby start systems at close to perfect C on
| a ship built with little more than our current 21st
| century technology. Fun, but not even in the most basic
| way an attempt at presenting any science seriously.
|
| What makes it more amusing is that for many other parts
| of the main drama, he puts a lot of effort into making
| the descriptions and scenarios seem as realistic and
| science-rich as you could like. I suspect a lot of
| entertaining word salad there too though.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Not if you are an immortal AI or uploaded human.
| barrenko wrote:
| I really thought hitting "light speed" would just zoom it all
| in a minute, but nope... So much for my physics preconceptions.
| pdpi wrote:
| > would just zoom it all in a minute,
|
| The Earth is about 8 light-minutes away from the Sun :)
| barrenko wrote:
| I am not liking this fact.
| justusthane wrote:
| The sun could have exploded seven and a half minutes ago
| and we'd have no idea! Enjoy the next 30 seconds of your
| life.
| scraft wrote:
| Well, if you were traveling at light speed you could move
| anywhere in the universe instantly. If you are an observer on
| earth, watching an object move away from you at the speed of
| light, then it will take a very long time to traverse the
| tiniest regions of the universe.
| Reubachi wrote:
| Er, "instant" here is "relativistic instant."
|
| even in a vaccum, light speed travel from the travelers POV
| still takes time, and said traveler would perceive time
| passing exactly as occurring in that local space. But yes
| you're totally correct, the observer on earth would in this
| time see only the briefest part of my journey's trail due
| to light from my journey taking "exponentially" longer to
| travel back to the observer.
| uncircle wrote:
| True but doesn't matter how slow light is. The closest to c
| your speed is, the shortest the time you experience on board of
| the space ship. At light speed, space and time cease to exist.
| You reach destination instantly.
|
| So the goal is to create engines that can take us close to
| light speed. Then the issue is braking (spacetime expands as
| you slow down...)
| thrance wrote:
| If you travel at relativistic speeds, your trip will appear far
| shorter to you than to those that stayed on Earth.
|
| With a ship able to accelerate at 1G continuously, you can be
| at the edge of the observable universe in <50 subjective years
| [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s4tbry/oc_...
| sestep wrote:
| Naive question: is accelerating at 1G continuously within the
| range of what we consider possible?
| Vvector wrote:
| It's a simple question of weight ratios.
| thrance wrote:
| Not naive at all. With chemical rockets we can only sustain
| 1G for a few minutes, so it won't do at all for
| interstellar flights.
|
| There is a known way to achieve 100% fuel efficiency:
| antimatter. By storing equal parts matter and antimatter,
| you can fuse them to propel your spacecraft. It's unknown
| wether or not this kind of engine can actually be made.
|
| Alternatively, and even more far-fetched, you could onboard
| a small singularity. Dumping anything into it will result
| in it being turned to pure energy at 100% efficiency,
| through Hawking's radiations. The smallest the singularity,
| the fastest it radiates, meaning you can sort of control
| the output. You can create singularities with very large
| particle colliders.
|
| With 100% fuel efficiency you can probably sustain 1G for
| long enough to reach the nearest stars. You would need a
| very large spacecraft (on the order of kilometers) for a
| comparatively very small payload. And it would arrive
| completely empty at its destination, meaning no turning
| back. I think I saw someone do the math, but can't find it
| anymore.
|
| Anyway, there are other difficulties. Travelling at .99c
| means tiny space dust now becomes very dangerous. So does
| radiations, all made extremely energetic by the Doppler
| effect.
|
| On the plus side, continous 1G means you have artifical
| gravity for the whole trip.
| Reubachi wrote:
| Amazingly, yes, in a few ways (the mechanics are possible).
| But no in as many ways. (Fuel, sustainability, tracking)
|
| The greater barrier is that the nature of the expansion of
| the universe prevents any real interstellar travel that has
| a "destination" in mind. Of course we might have some "FTL"
| or "near light speed" travel in futre, but if the universe
| is expanding infintely from every point in space at light
| speed, how could we ever "catch up" to objects we see even
| now?
| brazzy wrote:
| This is not true. Expansion does not affect
| gravitationally bound structures. Our galaxy, and even
| the other galaxies in our local cluster, will stay in
| reach.
|
| Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/sr7f
| uo/is_there...
| jandrese wrote:
| If your travel involves the Rocket Equation the answer is
| no. If you are limited by the speed of light and the
| lifetime of human civilization then the expansion of the
| universe is not an issue. Traveling between nearby solar
| systems is very close to impossible, traveling between
| galaxies is outright impossible.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The lifetime of human civilization problem is an odd one,
| because due to relativity, one-way trips are not an
| unsurpassable hurdle ( 2-3 generations on a 1 G
| spacecraft to get pretty much anywhere). But you can't
| come back, because it's basically guaranteed there'll be
| nothing left for you to come back to. Because while it
| might take "only" two hundred years from the passengers
| perspective to reach the edge of the (current) observable
| universe and come back, they'll be arriving 90 billion
| years in the future.
| mr_toad wrote:
| The objects you can (eventually) reach are proportional
| to your speed. For example at half light speed you could
| catch up to objects nearly halfway to the Hubble Horizon,
| about 7 billion light years away.
| clocker wrote:
| > Lightly is incredibly slow
|
| Its relative! Sitting on a couch and watching the pixel move
| from the sun to the earth for 8 minutes feels incredibly slow
| but if you are actually traveling in a light speed aircraft
| then it won't feel that slow.
| quchen wrote:
| Quite the opposite, much like when skydiving, going really
| fast without any close reference point makes everything stand
| still. And in space, there wouldn't even be (very loud)
| atmospheric drag to physically remind you about what speed
| you're actually going.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| I believe the OP was referring to relativity - the closer
| to the speed of light you get the slower time appears to
| tick. So if you could travel at light speed you'd arrive at
| your destination immediately from your reference frame, but
| much slower from another person's.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Then what's up with all of those sci-fi chows where using
| FTL still takes some amount of time to arrive?
| krapp wrote:
| 1) it's better for the plot and drama to have travel
| time. FTL in fiction is always analagous to some known
| terrestrial form of travel (usually ships and boats) and
| the limitations and parameters of FTL in a fictional
| universe shape the narrative in necessary ways.
|
| 2) it's assumed within the framework of the fictional
| universe that time dilation isn't taking place because
| the actual travel is occurring within an external frame
| of reference like "hyperspace" or a "warp field."
| mr_toad wrote:
| Screenwriters don't understand much science.
| orobus wrote:
| If you were _actually_ traveling at the speed of light it
| wouldn 't feel like anything at all! Photons don't
| 'experience' time--any length trip would be instantaneous
| from the traveler's point of view.
| baxtr wrote:
| Me scrolling is faster than the speed of light!
|
| Nice.
| schaefer wrote:
| Dude, chill.
|
| We've got to preserve causality. :P
| philwelch wrote:
| We're barely even using our first solar system, it's way too
| early to be worried about reaching other stars.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Exactly, there is free fuel and aluminium just floating by,
| and we are unable to use them to upgrade our ships or refuel
| them.
|
| Until we make full use of robotics and 3D printing, there is
| no point of heading far. And we have all the tools.
|
| Distant stars will not be settled by a fast small ship
| travelling from earth. They will be settled by a city sized
| monolith produced by harvesting and smelting an entire small
| moon
| philwelch wrote:
| > Distant stars will not be settled by a fast small ship
| travelling from earth. They will be settled by a city sized
| monolith produced by harvesting and smelting an entire
| small moon
|
| I don't even think you'd need a whole moon unless it was a
| tiny one. Nonetheless, by the time we send a ship to
| another star, building these kinds of large self-contained
| habitats will be old hat.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| All of fiction and discourse fails to consider that the Solar
| System is actually a huge place and just the period of settling
| and industrialising it will take hundreds of years.
|
| Everyone things that a game breaker technology is better
| engines, or fusion, or FTL, but they are wrong, the game
| breaker technology has already happened: 3D printing.
|
| If we can manufacture things with minimal infrastructure using
| local resources, we can that is all we need.
|
| And all of it reachable with simple nuclear power and
| technology we have today.
| ck2 wrote:
| Alternate view:
|
| be thankful things are far apart
|
| a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star closer than 200 light
| years away would destroy ALL life on earth
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled
| down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality?
| People historically mistake plants for being inanimate things
| with no reactivity, that they are far more simple and stupid
| than they truly are. Outside of a few exotic examples, plants
| simply operate on a wider timescale that's basically
| imperceptible without careful and particular observation. It
| becomes much more apparent how alive plants are when we observe
| them in a time-lapse. Now realize that plants are still
| relatively short-lived. The absolute oldest ones only go back
| to the early neolithic, that's only 14000 years or so. 1000
| years is a long time for humans, but probably not for the trees
| where a single one can live 10x that.
|
| From the hypothetical perspective of a star, with a lifespan
| measured in billions upon billions of years, the entire
| ecoscape of the world changes in a blink. From the sun's
| perspective, MENA was green just a very short while ago. Hell,
| _Pangea_ wasn 't that long ago. At this timescale, continental
| drift would be as apparent as the movement of boats are to
| humans. Anything that's working at the cosmic scale where the
| seemingly low speed of light sounds exhausting is most
| definitely working at this stellar perspective at the minimum.
| 14000 years of travel might as well be the equivalent of a 10
| minute commute to the store.
|
| Philosophically speaking, of course.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| I always think of those motor proteins moving along slowly
| inside our bodies, and wonder if maybe we are just the motor
| proteins of the cosmic scale.
| M95D wrote:
| We have a long way to go before we learn to move a star (or
| a rosette).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Dude, pass the duchy.
| davidee wrote:
| Thanks for this.
|
| In addition to the insight, it reminded me to water a plant
| at a desk I no longer use. The plant's been with me through
| quite a bit and I have been neglecting it recently as I no
| longer see it regularly.
| nilamo wrote:
| Move your plant friend to your new desk?
| randalsedgewick wrote:
| In turn this reminded me to water my terribly neglected
| office plant, so thank you!
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Is light slow?
|
| It's always faster than you or I. Even if we zipped around at
| relativistic speeds it would still appear the same.
| swyx wrote:
| humans are a blip. i think the overwhelming scenario is we
| were a bootloading sequence for silico sapiens.
| chistev wrote:
| Comments like this are part of the reasons I come here.
| ifa_ wrote:
| yeah light _is_ actually pretty slow and we hit that in
| networking and optics pretty often if iirc.
|
| like not even on a human level, universally even on a grand
| scale the speed of light is almost torturously slow, there's
| nothing philosophical about it
| procgen wrote:
| something can only be "slow" relative to something else.
| it's not an intrinsic property.
| lenkite wrote:
| Might have been a deliberate rule enforced on the universe
| to avoid interstellar wars between sapient civilizations.
| lukas099 wrote:
| But that's making your simulation deliberately less
| interesting, no?
| chmod775 wrote:
| Chances are that only a species who, through one way or
| another, has become very uninterested in warfare could
| have advanced to the point where they would be able to
| run such a simulation, otherwise they'd have ended their
| own existence with their shiny toys before long.
|
| War only occurs if you have _in the literal sense_
| retarded elements in your advanced species and is
| nonsensical from an outside POV. A species this advanced
| would have fixed such shortcomings in itself long ago.
|
| So no, I don't think they'd necessarily be very
| interested in watching primitive species go to war with
| primitive weapons.
|
| For all we know the simulation of this universe is
| happening in their equivalent of an overengineered snow
| globe, us being an artifact nobody has noticed and that
| nobody would find particularly interesting if they did
| notice.
| mjcohen wrote:
| For very philosophical writings about this, read "Last and
| First Men" and "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon. Written in the
| 1930's, these describe on a very expansive scale the history
| of, respectively, humanity and the universe. Very mind
| bending.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just
| scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and
| infinitesimality?_
|
| It's slow for humans to explore the cosmos.
|
| "Slow" is meaningless without a frame of reference, and
| "humans" seems like a good frame of reference, since it's us
| -- and not plants or stars -- who are writing on HN to
| discuss this.
|
| Because it's us, humans discussing this in HN, the frame of
| reference is implied and it's not necessary to spell it out.
| notjoemama wrote:
| Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to
| the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from
| us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I
| love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It
| reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as
| short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds
| though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be
| white and brown dwarfs. Although, if we could orbit black
| holes and harness the energy of gravity, then we're really
| talking long time scales. Cracking the aging problem would
| allow us to think in very long timescales. But I do wonder
| whether the human psyche could handle such long lifespans.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| > in comparison to the distances that exist
|
| This leaves out the time component. Who's to say that a
| year is long? A galaxy a million light years away takes a
| million years to reach... and maybe that's a short amount
| of time, to the right observer.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Light could only go to Andromeda and back 1000 times
| before the sun burns out. That's not very many times IMO.
| On the scale of galaxies, light is slow relative to any
| timescale relevant to large objects.
| morsch wrote:
| Carrying the metaphor further, that's closer than America
| was to Europe in the 18th century.
| darkwater wrote:
| How many times can you go from Lisbon to Beijing and back
| by car in your lifetime?
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Not many, because cars are slow
| tim333 wrote:
| At the moment humans only live ~90 years which is a blip in
| cosmic terms, but shortly we should be able to merge with AI
| and live for billions of years and visit stars.
| api wrote:
| That's one of the answers to how you could go to the stars:
| go sloooooow as in slow down your cognition and metabolism so
| the trip doesn't take long.
|
| Ents could fly to the stars no problem.
|
| Makes me wonder if there might not be a bunch of star faring
| "slow life" out there that we don't notice for the same
| reason a hummingbird doesn't notice trees growing.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star.
| And maybe that'll be enough.
|
| I agree, but not because of the relative difficulty of the
| technology, but because we spend way more on entertainment than
| space exploration.
| smeeger wrote:
| you would need a ship that is also a city. a traveling space
| station. or probes. if humanity decided to send a small probe
| to the nearest foreign star, i wonder how many km/h current
| infrastructure could accomplish
| lisper wrote:
| It only seems incredibly slow in this model because it doesn't
| take special relativity into account. If it did, then as you
| approached the speed of light the Lorentz contraction would
| make wherever you are heading appear less far away. You can in
| theory get anywhere in the universe in an arbitrarily short
| amount of proper time your own reference frame. Of course, you
| might not survive the G-forces, but that's another matter.
| wafflemaker wrote:
| Don't forget gravity drive. No more Gs. And the same
| technology would give us real artificial gravity, not this
| nauseous rotation artificial gravity.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| You can accelerate continuously at a comfortable 1g and get
| to 0.5c in about 5 months. G forces are not the issue.
| lisper wrote:
| The Lorentz factor at 0.5 c is 0.86 so this only reduces
| your proper travel time by about 15%. Even at 0.9c the LF
| is only 0.43, so it would still take you 2 years just to
| get to Proxima Centauri. And as you approach c, 1G
| acceleration speeds you less and less. And you also have to
| slow down at your destination.
| munchler wrote:
| Not to mention that you also have to survive any
| collisions with specks of dust in between.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| Need that warp drive
| swyx wrote:
| what's your definition of a holodeck? i only know the one from
| star wars and thats kind of a toy
| UltraSane wrote:
| Stephen Baxter wrote a story named The Gravity Mine about the
| descendants of humanity living after all stars have died. They
| get energy from black holes but even they are starting to
| noticeably shrink. Their perception of time is billions of
| times slower than humans and the upshot of this is that the
| speed of light would actually seem pretty fast.
|
| https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/gravitymine.htm
| somenameforme wrote:
| Depends on who you mean by we. The universe is weird and it's
| entirely possible for you or I to travel essentially
| arbitrarily far in a single human lifetime, easily billions of
| light years. Relativity doesn't simply work as a speed limit;
| instead when things approach velocities anywhere near the speed
| of light, the universe starts contorting itself in really weird
| ways to maintain the perceived consistency of the speed of
| light.
|
| From the perspective of somebody in a ship moving at
| relativistic rates, distances would begin to physically
| contract, and time itself would begin to speed up relative to
| an at rest observer. Here [1] is a calculator to see what this
| all mathematically works out to. For instance, you could travel
| to Andromeda, some 2 million light years away, in about 28
| years in a ship that was capable of sustaining acceleration at
| 1g for 28 years. Of course for everybody back home 2 million
| years would pass. So if we ever achieve ships capable of this
| sort of acceleration, life is going to get really weird and
| non-linear, so far as time is concerned.
|
| And this isn't some just some weird fringe
| theoretical/mathematical thing. For instance GPS satellites
| have to compensate for time dilation because relativistic
| effects, though small in this case, would otherwise have a
| substantial effect. Another example is at things like the large
| hadron collider. As a convenient effect of relativistic
| effects, emergent unstable particles exist far longer than they
| 'normally' would before decaying due to the fact they're moving
| at relativistic rates.
|
| In other words, this is all very real. The only questionable
| issue is whether we can discover some sort of an energy source
| capable of accelerating a ship at 1g for tens of years, and
| develop sufficient shielding for such a vessel. That's still
| very much in the domain of sci-fi, but simultaneously seems
| like something that one wouldn't be entirely surprised to see
| was discovered just a century from now. This was the most
| tantalizing possibility behind the EMDrive stuff. [2] Well that
| or infinite energy, but it seems that universe won't be broken
| quite so easily just yet.
|
| [1] -
| http://www.convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator...
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
| CapsAdmin wrote:
| I've seen countless analogies that explain the size of space, but
| this was really something else. Especially how frustratingly slow
| the speed of light felt.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The light speed toggle really hammers home the emptiness. Like, I
| _know_ that the Earth is ~8 light minutes out, but sitting and
| waiting 8 minutes for a few pixels to appear when scrolling away
| from the sun...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| and even this is not making it super tangible, because the
| speed of light to monkey brains is basically infinite.
| kennu wrote:
| Scrolling with mouse scroll wheel a few hundred thousand
| kilometers at a time is so much work that I gave up :-(
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Its quite cool on the phone
| blueflow wrote:
| Repetitive strain injury any% speedrun
| werdnapk wrote:
| Click on the planet symbols at the top to fast track.
| mdaniel wrote:
| I'm thankful that the view-source:https://joshworth.com/dev/pix
| elspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... allows one to see the
| annotations since clicking on the planet jumps scrolls past
| them. My gratitude for not baking such things into 8MB of JS
|
| Also thanks to the view-source I learned that it offers
| different units, including busses, Great Wall of China, etc
| mxuribe wrote:
| This is truly marvelous! Not only is the horizontal scroll really
| extra awesome for making me feel the distances...but as others
| stated, the moment you toggle on the light speed....wow, it
| really is quite profound! Amazingly done!
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Wot no Oort Cloud?
| cmsefton wrote:
| Previous discussions (there are many!)
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| bradley13 wrote:
| I've seen models like this before. We live in a universe with
| many, _many_ orders of magnitude. In both directions. Living
| creatures to small to see, space too big to comprehend.
|
| Mining asteroids for space resources sounds great, right up until
| you consider the distances involved. Living on Mars - yes, we
| really should - but you sure aren't going to support a colony
| long-term from anywhere but local resources.
| zirgs wrote:
| We are pumping oil that's located under the seabed. It would
| have seemed completely insane in the 19th century when all oil
| was easily accessible. Asteroid mining might be feasible in a
| few decades. If it really gets going - it could make gold as
| cheap as aluminium is today.
| stevage wrote:
| I just love that this is still online after all these years.
| susam wrote:
| When I was dabbling with POV-Ray many moons ago, I drew the
| planets of our solar system to scale with it. You can see it
| here: https://github.com/susam/pov25#planets
|
| A friend once asked if I couldn't show the planets in orbit
| rather than lying flat on a plane. I could, of course, but this
| is ray tracing. What do planets actually look like to human eyes
| from Earth? Just tiny dots.
|
| If I were to show them in their proper orbits at scale using
| perspective projection, I'd only be able to render one planet
| large enough to be visually interesting. The rest would appear as
| small dots. I didn't want to use an orthographic projection, as
| it wouldn't reflect how we actually see the universe.
|
| Those were, of course, limitations of a still image. An
| interactive page like the one in the original post does a
| fantastic job of conveying the vast scale of our solar system,
| both in terms of the sizes of the planets and the immense
| distances between them.
| dahart wrote:
| Would you have to use double precision to ray trace the planets
| in their proper orbits at scale using either perspective or
| orthographic projection? With the ratio of Neptune's distance
| from the sun to its radius being almost 2M, I'm guessing fp32
| rounding would turn Neptune into a couple of squares if the sun
| was at the origin. What other challenges would there be? Maybe
| I'll try it today just for fun.
| dahart wrote:
| I tried it, including Pluto, and it works fine. Shading is
| quantized at Pluto but the spheres are all round.
| mg wrote:
| The way I often visualize the solar system is:
|
| If the sun would be the size of a coin, then earth would be
| around 2m away from it and so small you could barely see it.
| okokwhatever wrote:
| Lovely
| technothrasher wrote:
| I remember back in elementary school, way before we had such
| things on computer, we had a vinyl roll for the age of the
| planet. You'd roll it out in the hallway, starting with present
| day and watch as the different time periods came into view. You
| were just a few feet at the origin of man, at the end of the
| hallway by the time you got to the beginning of Cambrian era, and
| out the door and across the huge athletic field before you got to
| the formation of the planet.
| 1over137 wrote:
| How does this website work? I feel like I'm stuck on the first
| screen maybe? It says 'scroll to explore' but there are no
| scrollbars. Does it only work with a mouse with a scroll wheel?
| jenoer wrote:
| Scroll horizontally, to the right.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| We're never going to leave this planet/solar system if we don't
| discover FTL (Faster Than Light) travel. Pretty scary if you
| think about how ridiculously empty is space.
| Andrex wrote:
| We can _leave_ it pretty easily. :p Only took Voyager 1 about
| 40 years.
|
| If ~1.0C is the fastest man can travel, that's still pretty
| good. Alpha Centauri is in reach (less than five light-years).
| jandrese wrote:
| Alpha Centauri is a triple star system with no habitable
| planets. Why in the hell would you go there? Sending people
| to another solar system is so resource intensive that
| assuming you can convert the entirety of Jupiter into some
| kind of orders of magnitude more efficient exotic rocket fuel
| you might have enough resources for a small handful of
| expeditions, so you really need to make them count.
|
| Maybe it would make sense if you could convert the mass of
| Proxima Centauri into rocket fuel to fund more expeditions?
| That seems like a fairly long term plan though.
| raindev wrote:
| The planets are just grains of sand in a vast empty space.
| gary17the wrote:
| How does all that space out there make you feel about the 30
| years of paying off your mortgage for all that 0.25 acres of land
| you own? ;) J/K
| tomxor wrote:
| Shameless plug: Accurate solar system in 192 Bytes:
|
| https://www.dwitter.net/d/26521
|
| The red bit is the sun. 1000 kilometers per pixel, and 1000
| seconds per second.
|
| They all fit onto the screen by looking through the orbital
| plane, as if through a telescope from a distant world, i.e
| effectively an orthographic projection. The orbits are accurate
| in terms of mean orbital distance (in reality there is slight
| perturbance) and sidereal periods.
| darajava wrote:
| Incredible - how does this work?
| tomxor wrote:
| You mean technically? I should have posted the beta dwitter
| link which has the "compress" toggle, because most dweets are
| unicode packed. https://beta.dwitter.net/d/26521
|
| Here's the js anyway: for(i=10;i--;x.fillStyl
| e=R(i-8||255),x.beginPath(x.fill()))x.arc(960+[45,29,14,8,2,1
| .5,1,.6,0,0][i]*1e5*S(t/5e3/[165,84,29,12,2,1,.6,.2,1,1][i]),
| 540,[24,25,58,69,3.4,6.4,6,2.4,696,2e3][i],0,7)
|
| This one is actually relatively simple to explain, it loops
| over the 10 planets (i), and draws a circle for each, with
| the position and size all being defined in the x.arc method.
| Planets are differentiated by the arrays of values selected
| by [i]. The X position is calculated as the orbital distance
| multiplied by the sine of time / orbital period... d x
| sin(t/p). But d and p are substituted for the value for each
| planet using the arrays [1,2,3][i].
|
| Surprisingly the precision used in those encoded values is
| enough at 1000km per pixel (I checked).
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| I presume including Pluto's parameters in the array is both
| a rebellious statement and a brag. ("Yes, my JS snippet
| could have been even shorter if you asked the IAU.")
| tomxor wrote:
| Actually I couldn't fit Pluto, I sacrificed everything I
| could, but to fit it would require sacrificing the
| precision of Mars, Earth and Mercury (dropping the
| decimal), but I wanted to maintain enough precision to be
| able to tell them apart by size (which you just about can
| at full screen due to antialiasing)... Otherwise I
| definitely would have included it for that very sentiment
| ;)
|
| The reason there are 10 radi is for 8 planets + sun +
| drawing the black backdrop (2e3):
| [24,25,58,69,3.4,6.4,6,2.4,696,2e3]
| jethkl wrote:
| There are many physical scale models of the solar system around
| the world, many walkable, some bikeable:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model
|
| I've seen several, Planet Trek in Wisconsin is a good bikeable
| one with high quality signage. The sun is downtown, the moon is
| the size of a peach pit, Pluto is ~20 miles away.
| idlewords wrote:
| And for the lazy, there's the 1:1 scale model under your feet.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I love how simple the HTML/CSS is. Absolute positioning with
| _really_ large left: values. #saturn {
| position: absolute; left: 412397px;
| height: 34px; width: 65px; fill: #ffa043;
| }
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Caused Brave in iOS to crash. I have a newer iPad mini with
| 12GB ram too. But luckily It didn't crash until I tried to
| close the tab.
| pc86 wrote:
| This seems like a browser issue more than anything else. Yes
| it's "weird" to have millions of pixels horizontally on a
| page that is only a few thousand pixels tall, but it seems
| like an absolutely reasonable edge case that the browser
| should support.
| Sharlin wrote:
| "Why not save space by storing dimensions as uint16
| internally?"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| For the record, this HN page is already about halfway to
| overflowing uint16. The most popular HN page in the last
| day _would_ overflow uint16.
| zhengyi13 wrote:
| I feel there's a joke here about "edge" cases from
| scrolling ridiculously long horizontal distances, but I'm
| not smart enough to make it.
| wltr wrote:
| And then it's asking for Internet Explorer joke then, as
| an explorer something, not I'm not able to come up with
| it either.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| We have come full circle. I'd imagine that px uses a surprising
| amount of abstraction.
| cheschire wrote:
| Anyone that has tried to absolutely position shapes on an
| Excel spreadsheet via code would probably agree.
|
| Who the hell decided to make EMU's??
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Huge values could rise problems on IE (if someone keep using it
| and supporting it)
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| I love it, I always love these things. Still, given this is a
| technical site, one small nitpick is that it would be nice on
| hover to see how many pixels the current object is.
| mdaniel wrote:
| No need to hover, the drop-down next to the measurement at the
| bottom has Pixels. Clicking on the Pluto quick-nav shows that
| it is 1,700,530px
| zengineer wrote:
| Love it! Are there stats on how many people scrolled to the end?
| :)
| eric-p7 wrote:
| You may think this page is big. But that's just peanuts to space.
| Symmetry wrote:
| One thing to notice is how small Mercury is, only 1 pixel like
| the moons that show up. Here's a good photo size comparison.
| Mercury is smaller that two of the solar system's moon!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary-mass_object#/media/F...
|
| EDIT: And Pluto is smaller than all the moons almost anyone has
| heard of.
| j_m_b wrote:
| One of my favorite visualizations of the scale of the solar
| system is from Stephen Hawking's Genius.
|
| https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking_genius_ep...
|
| It's a hands-on, practical example of how far things are away
| that we can easily visualize. I highly recommend the rest of the
| series as well. It's one of the best science shows ever produced.
| It shows the practical path of scientific discovery. You can
| watch is on the PBS app, which requires a $60 a year pass. Highly
| worth it. (I have no affiliation with PBS)
| Kuyawa wrote:
| I've always used this aprox dimensions: Sun
| diam 1,400,000 km Eth diam 13,000 km Sun
| dist 150,000,000 km Mon diam 3,500 km Mon
| dist 300,000 km
|
| Lets divide it all by 1M. So if the sun is 1.4m in diameter, it
| would be located 150m from earth which would be 13mm in
| diameter and the moon would be 3.5mm located 0.3m from earth
|
| Simply put, imagine a yellow beach ball the size of a washing
| machine located a block and a half away from your house, a blue
| marble being the earth on one side of your keyboard and a
| peanut being the moon on the other side
| Kuyawa wrote:
| Now, using the basketball 24cm (earth) and tennis ball 6.5cm
| (moon) comparison, they would be separated by 7m in your
| living room and the sun would be 13m tall (a cherry tree)
| located at 3km from your house
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Not the same but related? Powers of 10 by Eames
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
|
| Interestingly, that Hawking visualization makes all the same
| affordances mentioned in the 1 pixel visualization. They show
| the earth and moon to scale, then the video shows an aerial
| view with all the planets much too large. Jupiter is 2x the
| size of the sun. Saturn and its rings 2x that.
| jadbox wrote:
| Unrelated, but the Elon dream of getting a human colony on Mars
| seems beyond imagination. Ignoring safety of such a long travel,
| the radiation issue of Mar's surface, and the massive
| infrastructure to have a self-sustainable biosphere (also somehow
| protected from radiation) to recycle enough oxygen, we still have
| to deal with the immense number of failures that could happen
| with no way to send help.
|
| Like, building a fully self-sustainable underwater city or moon
| base would be far more in reach. It feels that SpaceX should
| start with prototyping these safer alternatively before
| overreaching to something 100x more challenging and dangerous.
| brazzy wrote:
| It's very clearly not "beyond imagination". It doesn't require
| any fundamentally new technology.
|
| It may well be beyond our ability to practically apply those
| technologies at the required scales and reliability levels, but
| that's hardly unimaginable.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Preventing cancerous damage from radiation is absolutely
| beyond our tech.
|
| Unless you consider launching a lead-lined spaceship "within
| our tech."
|
| The marsonauts won't die before reaching Mars, but their
| lifespans will be significantly shortened.
| jandrese wrote:
| > Like, building a fully self-sustainable underwater city or
| moon base would be far more in reach. It feels that SpaceX
| should start with prototyping these safer alternatively before
| overreaching to something 100x more challenging and dangerous.
|
| I've been beating this drum for years. Elon is 100% focused on
| building the rocket that can get to Mars and neglecting
| absolutely everything else about the project. Where is the self
| contained biosphere pilot program on Earth that tests the Mars
| habitat? To be anywhere close to Elon's timetable it needs to
| be running today, and honestly it should have been running
| years ago. Given the extreme reliability requirements it needs
| long term testing to build any confidence at all in the
| numerous technologies involved. The closest model we have is
| the ISS, and it's mostly shown that we aren't ready for a Mars
| habitat. The ISS requires way too much maintenance and ground
| support.
| jandrese wrote:
| The problem with Mars is that if something goes wrong you
| can't just "fly back on the rocket". The launch windows are 2
| years apart. You either fix it in place or you die.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| At least theoretically it should be doable. But I think it will
| be similar to the moon landings. My prediction: People are
| going to lose interest in the project very quickly. It will be
| prohibitively expensive to maintain and there is simply nothing
| to do. You couldn't even really have a remote programming job
| there. A light round trip takes between 6 and 44 minutes,
| completely unsustainable.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| If you're really interested in a deep dive on this subject then
| I really recommend "A City On Mars" by Zach and Kelly
| Weinersmith (of SMBC). It goes very deep into things like - can
| you have babies successfully in space?
| drewchew wrote:
| I've probably thought about this website daily or weekly since it
| originally came out. Glad to know it still exists.
| botverse wrote:
| I've been thinking about how to teach the size and proportions of
| the solar system to my kids, I've bought a couple of packs of
| blank RFID cards on which I intend to paint the planets over a
| starred background. And then walk with my kids the meters
| necessary to cover the distances before displaying them. What I
| don't know is if there is a clever way to use the RFID tech, this
| website kinda offers an idea.
| ge96 wrote:
| space engine is neat
| dcminter wrote:
| Or you could come to Sweden :)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System
| ge96 wrote:
| I like the other one where you can zoom in/out to planck level or
| to the unobserved universe
| silasdb wrote:
| This is a great website--it reminds me of _To Scale: The Solar
| System_ [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a
| true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a
| tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Douglas Adams said it best:
|
| Space is 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.
| smeeger wrote:
| why have we not shot a probe toward the nearest foreign star?
| foxglacier wrote:
| I'm not sure we'd be capable of receiving any signal it sent
| back to us, would we?
| tombrandis wrote:
| There was a plan in ~2016 backed by Zuckerberg, Hawking and
| some entrepreneur but it didn't really get anywhere (in a
| literal sense). Research for it stopped in 2022 because of a
| "lack of funding".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
|
| https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/mark-zuckerber...
| kazinator wrote:
| > _We 're always trying to come up with metaphors for big
| numbers. Even so, they never seem to work._
|
| Yeah, that Googol often doesn't work.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Pedantic me : Pluto isn't a planet.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| It's not space that's big and out of reach, it's just us living
| too fast.
| kristopolous wrote:
| This makes the Theia hypothesis all the more extraordinary
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(hypothetical_planet)
|
| I believe the scientific record is drawing a consensus on this as
| the moon's origin but the wild sparseness of space just makes
| this sound really unusual.
| aledalgrande wrote:
| This is super cool. It's crazy to think about asteroids in any
| depiction of the solar system look so packed that I thought a
| spaceship would never be able to pass through unscathed, but here
| it's all black because they are basically irrelevant lol
|
| Also crazy how far Jupiter's gravity can keep a moon??
| nothacking_ wrote:
| Importantly, the planets aren't actually lined up nicely like on
| the site. Right now, Mars is ~5 times further then shown.
|
| That's why so many people were taking pictures of Mars back in
| January, when it was actually possible to take see detail. Right
| now it just looks like a red orb.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _If the moon were only 1 pixel_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686916 - March 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936581 - Sept 2022 (108
| comments)
|
| _If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 - June 2021 (69
| comments)
|
| _If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735528 - Dec 2019 (82
| comments)
|
| _If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the
| solar system_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 -
| March 2017 (81 comments)
|
| _If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the
| solar system_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 -
| Dec 2016 (11 comments)
|
| _If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 - July 2016 (4
| comments)
|
| _A Ridiculously large accurate scale model of the Solar System_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330303 - Oct 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _If the moon were only 1 pixel: a scale model of the solar
| system_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 - April
| 2014 (17 comments)
|
| _If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 - March 2014 (178
| comments)
| initramfs wrote:
| nice!
| chachacharge wrote:
| sit back and relax for my 1px review
|
| tedious=true, basicallyLame=true, is1px=false
| idlewords wrote:
| The universe is a UI nightmare
| sepidy wrote:
| This was so cool I would add the planets as indicators on the
| right side and by clicking on them I would move the timeline fast
| to reach them
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| somewhat defeats the point I think (but they are at the top if
| you really want to)
| knoxg wrote:
| Look I'm no astronomer, but I'm pretty sure celestial bodies all
| have elliptical orbits, so if you're going to label something as
| 'tediously accurate' you should give some indication that the
| distances from the sun are changing over the orbital period.
| rstuart4133 wrote:
| Didn't have the patience to read the fine article?
| Understandable I guess, but I thought it was worth the effort.
| Quoting from it:
|
| > 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.
| joshbetz wrote:
| Reminds me of a 23 mile long model of the solar system in Madison
| https://www.astro.wisc.edu/outreach/planet-trek/
| computator wrote:
| Given the great distances and how small the planets seem at that
| scale, I'm surprised that we can see any of the planets with the
| naked eye. Thinking about Jupiter, it's 140K km in diameter and
| about 629M km from Earth. That's a ratio of 1:4500. So imagine a
| U.S. dime that is 1.8cm in diameter placed 1.8 x 4500 = 8100 cm
| away. Would you be able to see a dime that it 81m or 266ft away
| at nighttime, assuming it slightly illuminated? We can see
| Jupiter, so I guess we should be able to see the illuminated dime
| too.
| bandrami wrote:
| I've always thought that people pushing for colonization or even
| commercial exploitation of space simply don't have a good sense
| of how _far_ things are and how _empty_ the space between us and
| those things are.
| manquer wrote:
| That has always been the case, there is loads of empty distance
| between big population centers even today there are big cities
| many hours by flight from anywhere else of interest.
|
| In the age of sail, people were perfectly willing to spend
| months in transit .
|
| Transit times for most objects of commercial interest (i.e.
| upto moons of Saturns) is only in years if you use a low
| energy/Delta-v Hohmann transfer orbits and/or gravity assists
| as is common today for probes.
|
| Direct transfer would be expected for human transits , those
| can be fairly quick . Transfers to mars within the next 1-2
| decades is doable in 6months or less.
|
| There are no fundamental breakthroughs needed to go any orbits
| we would be interested in 1 year or less by end of this
| century.
|
| On the other hand I do agree going interstellar is a whole
| different scale of empty and without near light speed (even
| with ) is probably out of reach .
| gblargg wrote:
| > tediously accurate
|
| Could the planets and moons ever all be aligned like this when
| viewed from an infinite distance?
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I love the little facts sprinkled throughout
| kitchendesign wrote:
| How many times can you go from Beijing to Lisbon ?
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