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If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
- andersco 1y agoStill 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 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=if+moon+only+1+pixel
- IggleSniggle 1y agoIt'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/ https://hmijail.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
- athenot 1y agoOn the same note: https://xkcd.com/980/ https://xkcd.com/980/ (from 2011 when Bezos "only" had $18b)
- zurfer 1y agothat'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 1y agoThis 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.
- amelius 1y agoMake 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 1y agoMaybe light’s insanely fast and space is just huge. It’s all relative ;)
- isolli 1y agoI 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 1y agoLuckily FTL communication isn't actually impossible and special relativity only applies to energy and mass.
- krapp 1y agoFTL communication is actually impossible, what are you talking about?
- jordigh 1y agoI 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 1y ago> violates causality But we don’t know that casualty is a law of physics, do we?
- IAmBroom 1y agoOnly inasmuch as we don't know that gravity and the Strong Nuclear Force aren't.
- 1y ago
- CapsAdmin 1y agoI'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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoand even this is not making it super tangible, because the speed of light to monkey brains is basically infinite.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kennu 1y agoScrolling with mouse scroll wheel a few hundred thousand kilometers at a time is so much work that I gave up :-(
- tacker2000 1y agoIts quite cool on the phone
- blueflow 1y agoRepetitive strain injury any% speedrun
- werdnapk 1y agoClick on the planet symbols at the top to fast track.
- mdaniel 1y agoI'm thankful that the view-source:https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoWot no Oort Cloud?
- KolibriFly 1y agoI love the little facts sprinkled throughout
- cmsefton 1y agoPrevious discussions (there are many!) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=joshworth.com&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- bradley13 1y agoI'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 1y agoWe 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 1y agoI just love that this is still online after all these years.
- susam 1y agoWhen 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 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 1y agoWould 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 1y agoI tried it, including Pluto, and it works fine. Shading is quantized at Pluto but the spheres are all round.
- mg 1y agoThe 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- okokwhatever 1y agoLovely
- technothrasher 1y agoI 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 1over137 1y agoHow 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 1y agoScroll horizontally, to the right.
- NKosmatos 1y agoWe’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 1y agoWe 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 1y agoAlpha 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.
- Andrex 1y agoI mean, why did we go to Mars without any intention of colonizing it? The Moon? Exploration is what humans do. If Alpha Centauri is only 5 years away, you can bet we're sending people there no matter what. Permanent colonization only becomes a priority in an existential event, and if we eventually achieve ~1.0C travel then that implies our tech is at a level we'd be colonizing Mars and a few moons long before we think about leaving the solar system. Even getting to 0.9C is going to be very very hard for humanity.
- raindev 1y agoThe planets are just grains of sand in a vast empty space.
- gary17the 1y agoHow 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 1y agoShameless plug: Accurate solar system in 192 Bytes: https://www.dwitter.net/d/26521 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 1y agoIncredible - how does this work?
- tomxor 1y agoYou 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 https://beta.dwitter.net/d/26521 Here's the js anyway: for(i=10;i--;x.fillStyle=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 1y agoI 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 1y ago
- jethkl 1y agoThere are many physical scale models of the solar system around the world, many walkable, some bikeable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model 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 1y agoAnd for the lazy, there's the 1:1 scale model under your feet.
- amiga386 1y agoI 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 1y agoCaused 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 1y agoThis 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.
- zhengyi13 1y agoI 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 1y agoAnd then it’s asking for Internet Explorer joke then, as an explorer something, not I’m not able to come up with it either.
- Sharlin 1y ago“Why not save space by storing dimensions as uint16 internally?”
- Dylan16807 1y agoFor the record, this HN page is already about halfway to overflowing uint16. The most popular HN page in the last day would overflow uint16.
- whoisthemachine 1y agoI 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 1y agoNo 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 1y agoLove it! Are there stats on how many people scrolled to the end? :)
- eric-p7 1y agoYou may think this page is big. But that's just peanuts to space.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Symmetry 1y agoOne 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/File:25_solar_system_objects_smaller_than_Earth.jpg 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 1y agoOne of my favorite visualizations of the scale of the solar system is from Stephen Hawking's Genius. https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking_genius_ep06_clip03/where-are-we-ch-3-solar-eclipse-genius-by-stephen-hawking/ 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 1y agoI'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 1y agoNow, 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 1y agoNot the same but related? Powers of 10 by Eames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 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 1y agoUnrelated, 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 1y agoIt'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 1y agoPreventing 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 1y ago> 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.
- drewchew 1y agoI've probably thought about this website daily or weekly since it originally came out. Glad to know it still exists.
- botverse 1y agoI’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 1y agoI like the other one where you can zoom in/out to planck level or to the unobserved universe
- silasdb 1y agoThis 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg
- sizzzzlerz 1y agoDouglas 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- smeeger 1y agowhy have we not shot a probe toward the nearest foreign star?
- foxglacier 1y agoI'm not sure we'd be capable of receiving any signal it sent back to us, would we?
- tombrandis 1y agoThere 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/mark-zuckerbergs-100m-interstellar-space https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/mark-zuckerber...
- kazinator 1y ago> 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 1y agoPedantic me : Pluto isn't a planet.
- stackedinserter 1y agoIt's not space that's big and out of reach, it's just us living too fast.
- kristopolous 1y agoThis makes the Theia hypothesis all the more extraordinary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(hypothetical_planet) 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 1y agoThis 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_ 1y agoImportantly, 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 1y agoRelated. Others? If the moon were only 1 pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686916 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 - March 2014 (178 comments)
- initramfs 1y agonice!
- chachacharge 1y agosit back and relax for my 1px review tedious=true, basicallyLame=true, is1px=false
- idlewords 1y agoThe universe is a UI nightmare
- sepidy 1y agoThis 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 1y agosomewhat defeats the point I think (but they are at the top if you really want to)
- knoxg 1y agoLook 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 1y agoDidn'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 1y agoReminds me of a 23 mile long model of the solar system in Madison https://www.astro.wisc.edu/outreach/planet-trek/ https://www.astro.wisc.edu/outreach/planet-trek/
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- computator 1y agoGiven 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 1y agoI'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 1y agoThat 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 1y ago> tediously accurate Could the planets and moons ever all be aligned like this when viewed from an infinite distance?
- kitchendesign 1y agoHow many times can you go from Beijing to Lisbon ?
- mahdihabibi 1y agoThank you for including Pluto!