If the Earth were 100 pixels wide

[brownbat]

I'd really like to see a few more markers:

1) 3100 px: Farthest humans have been from Earth (Apollo 13, April '70: 400,171 km)

2) 10 px: Gemini 11, farthest from Earth on non-lunar mission (Sept '66: 1,374.1 km)

3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Far...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Taking Earth's diameter as 12,742 km (though it bulges by about 43 km in the center), we're saying that's 100 px. So if my basic algebra is right (no promises) you can convert the above km values to px by dividing by 127.42.

[sho_hn]

I think the value of this is in its focus and simplicity. There have been other websites using zooms and/or scrolling to visualize scale differences (e.g. http://scaleofuniverse.com/), but this is an elegant statement about just one fact, and I think that's more likely to get the ball rolling in someone's brain and amaze them than inundating them with trivia all at once (but thanks for the trivia just the same :).

[xefer]

Several years ago J. Richard Gott and Mario Jurić of Princeton put together an awesome logarithmic map of the entire universe:

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/

[jobigoud]

"3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)"

You're forgetting STS-125, the last Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission, March 2009, Apogee 578 Km.

[thangalin]

I made a 3D render of a flyby. I should have added markers from the space programs into the video. The video shows how long it would take to reach all the planets, if you flew at a constant velocity (about 10x light speed).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ

[fabriceleal]

I would like to see Voyager 1 (about 1.847×10^10 km, accordingly to wikipedia [1])

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1

[EDIT] 1000 to 10^10 :P

[ohazi]

Is anyone else a little bothered by the fact that the reported speed was 1/5 the speed of light, yet the flyby necessarily increased to well over the speed of light in order to actually get you to Mars before you got bored and closed the tab? Traveling at the speed of light would have taken 5-20 minutes. Traveling slower than that would have taken even longer...

[aqme28]

Travelling at the speed of light would have taken 0 seconds for you, the traveller, but 5-20 minutes for your observer.

However, the Lorentz factor at 20% of the speed of light is ~1.02. This means the distance you travel is only about 2% shorter, so relativistic effects aren't the reason for the discrepancy.

[JDGM]

What is bothering me most now is that if Earth is 100 pixels wide then 1 pixel is 127.42km and Mars should be something like 54600000/127.42 = ~428500 pixels away, not the claimed 857000. The radius of planets has been used where it should be diameter and this error seems to have been carried forward throughout the demonstration.

EDIT: This has now been corrected - nice one!

[aetherson]

Yeah, I hadn't realized that they were doing that, and it does bother me. I don't mind the idea that we're going FTL, but they should explain that in the text, not just report 20% of the speed of light. Ironically, it makes the distances seem shorter than they are, in a thing that seems designed to make you understand how long they are.

[afterburner]

Speed of light: 1.07925285 × 10e9 km/h Reported speed: 200,000 km/h

So more like 1/5000 the speed of light. But as pointed out below the reported speed may be way off.

I wonder if a mistake about the speed of light was made; it's about 300,000 km per second.

[doktrin]

I also wish they would have noted the acceleration. Not doing so in fact undermines the point they're probably trying to make (giving users a visceral feel for the distances involved). Can't say it bothered me, though.

[primitur]

I'm more bothered by the authoritative fact that 'the timeline for a manned mission to Mars is the 2030s'. Says who, NASA?

They're not the only ones trying to get there.

[Jabbles]

For me it currently says "You're currently travelling at 7,000 pixels a second 200,000 km/h" - which is clearly wrong, as at that speed it would take an hour to get to the moon.

Good idea, well intentioned. But they got the numbers wrong...

[chm]

Distances are in pixels, with the Earth's diameter being 100 px.

[shardling]

It bothers me a little that they show the motion against a starfield like that -- the stars are so far away that they won't shift perceptibly even on a journey to mars.

I mean, I don't have any better ideas, but given that the whole point is to give an idea of scale I wish they'd come up with something else. :)

[austenallred]

This is the first time I've actually been able to comprehend the perspective of distances so big they don't mean much as a number. Thank you.

[rkuester]

Cool site, but it's "If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, ..."

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...

</pedantry>

[acheron]

Thank you! I tweeted this link earlier and had originally copied the "was", then realized it sounded wrong and corrected it.

[xefer]

It's the only time we get to use a different word to express the subjunctive mood in English.

[codeulike]

This simple graphic of the Earth and Moon and the distance between them, to scale, is also pretty thought provoking

http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html

edit: just large image: http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jp...

[pjungwir]

Here is a photo of the Earth and Moon, with the to-scale distance between them. It makes a great desktop background:

http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/

[millerm]

That's actually a pretty cool photo. I was staring at it, as my new background, and was thinking how amazing it is that their mutual gravitational influence is actually enough to keep the moon in its orbit. I guess I mean it's hard to tell just how massive yet, in contrast, how small something like the earth and moon are. That or it's the half bottle of beer I've had.

[tankbot]

This is really cool, though I would like to see a version in higher resolution with some stars. Not oppressively bright stars, just a hint to remind you that there are billions of billions of violent, fiery balls of self-contained exploding gas out there...

[arc_of_descent]

Set it as my desktop background. Made me realize how dirty my monitor screen was. :)

[crazygringo]

Very rarely have I seen a single idea so perfectly illustrated. Impeccable timing and presentation. Unexpected, every step of the way. Kudos.

[DavePaliwoda]

Hey guys, Dave here, made the site.. Really amazed by how much coverage this thing has got, and really surprised by how poor my maths were. Not surprising given I failed both maths and physics at college. Really happy to be inspiring debate, I've gone over my sums and given it another shot

Thanks!

[stcredzero]

"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"

This makes it immediately obvious you haven't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understand how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.

http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...

[vadman]

Not sure if it's a bug or a typo, but the "width" (diameter) of the Earth is 12,742 km, not 6,371 (which is the radius).

[JDGM]

You're right! How frustrating. The most frustrating is that I was just about to share this with some friends and know that I now risk either: 1.) Them smugly pointing that inaccuracy out and failing to enjoy how cool this is otherwise, or 2.) The website author correcting it by the time my friends see the link so any "btw there's a typo" comment I make being confusing. I'm going to share it anyway!

EDIT: I fear this may be worse than we had initially thought. The diameters of the Moon and Mars suffer the same problem and the pixel distances appear to be based on those wrong numbers so actually all the "apparent" distances are twice as long as they should be. (My working was to check that the Earth was indeed 100 pixels on my screen, calculate that 1 pixel = 127.42km, multiply that by the claimed "6033 pixels" to the moon to get 768724.86 which is twice as large as it should be...)

[itafroma]

I tweeted the error to the creator (David Paliwoda) and it's now been corrected.

[zyb09]

Shouldn't it be something more like 20,000 km, since the equator is about 40,000 km long and we're looking at half of it? Anyway 6,371 can't be right though.

[CmdrKrool]

Cool.

Unfortunately though, on my regular setup of Firefox on Windows, the background image abruptly 'runs out' shortly after the "You're currently travelling at 70000 pixels/second" message appears, leaving me with a blank white screen. I believe this is due to this browser bug I've just found out about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816917

Fine on Chrome though.

[maurits]

My favourite scale of the universe picture:

http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg

[stcredzero]

"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"

Uh, no. The person who put this together obviously hasn't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understands how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.

http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...

[danielweber]

You can keep on shortening the trip by another day, but it requires more energy each day you take off.

At a certain point (somewhere around 5-6 months) it makes more sense to use that energy to give yourself a bigger ship than to take another day off.

(I'm glad to see no one saying any more that the VASIMR could do it in 39 days. That was an annoying distraction.)

[mark-r]

I'd love to see the Sun included on the opposite side of the scale. Its diameter is 109 times that of earth, making it 10900 pixels. Would be just as impressive a demonstration.

[devgutt]

I didn't go through much, but I'm quite sure that in that scale, It would be a flat line

[fusiongyro]

What's frustrating is how much better of a candidate Venus would be, if it weren't for its atmosphere. It's closer than Mars and larger too.

[keiferski]

Theoretically, we could build floating cities on Venus:

Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 km above Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the solar system – a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C–50°C range.

Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates rather than an explosive decompression, giving time to repair any such damages. In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, protection from the acidic rain and on some occasions low level protection against heat. Alternatively, two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_city_(science_fiction)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...

[InclinedPlane]

Kind of a silly thing to say though. If Mars had a "better" atmosphere too it'd be that much more superior as a colonization target.

[izend]

I like to imagine if Mars and Venus were swapped would Venus then be habitable?

[joeycastillo]

One thing that's always gotten to me about this distance is what it means for communication latency. Mars is 20 light-minutes away. If we sent colonists, communication would be a 40-minute round trip. No phone calls home, no way to have a chat with friends or loved ones; at best they could send a message, and wait 40 minutes for a reply. That's far away.

[DanBC]

The few pixels to the low Earth orbit and ISS is gently depressing. When's the last time a human went further than that? 1972?

[ErrantX]

Oh this is fantastic! My father teaches astronomy to kids (he has a mobile planetarium that he takes around schools [1]) and one of the main pain points he has mentioned is communicating a sense of scale to them.

This is elegant because it mixes the concept of "imagine this orange is the earth, mars would be in <nearby town>" within the constraints of a web page.

Kids have difficulty visualising distances in an abstract way - but time is much simpler. And the length of the scroll to Mars really emphasises this.

Great visualisation.

1. http://www.starlincs.co.uk

[S4M]

It's nice but his scale is wrong. He states that the Earth is 6371 km large, while in reality, it's twice that, as 6371 km is just the radius of the Earth, and what you really see is its diameter.

[JDGM]

Indeed, and it appears that 63.71km per pixel has then been used to calculate the pixel distances to the Moon and to Mars so in fact they are twice as many pixels long as they should be.

[VLM]

Nicely done. A biology scaled version would be cool. Like if a virus was 100 pixels wide...