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If the Earth were 100 pixels wide
- 3327 14y agoif I leave it running will I get to mars? just out of curiosity? ( i do have better things to do ).
- damon_c 14y ago(spoilers ahead) Yes.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- shanelja 14y agoYeah, it's about 530,000 pixels away, kind of shows the grand scale of our solar system and that's just the parts have have a chance of reaching any time soon.
- jerf 14y agoOr you can turn off Javascript and hit the "End" key. Alas, there does not seem to be any real-life equivalent to that.
- 3327 14y agoScotty is yet to invent the warp teleportation theory...
- austenallred 14y agoThis 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.
- marcosdumay 14y agoYou can easily build an in 1:2e9 scale replica of the Solar System. You'll just need a 90cm sphere to use as the Sun, some 4-5 km of area do arrange things and a paquimeter for measuring the planets. At this scale, everything is just about as big/small as one can manipulate. Bu you won't be able to place the Voyager in there. For that you'll need a car and a road trip.
- sjwright 14y agoThe satellite or the Intrepid-class starship?
- stcredzero 14y agoVoyager isn't a satellite of any body.
- ajays 14y agoIsn't there such a thing in downtown Ithaca?
- ptaipale 14y agoApparently yes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk There are a multitude of others all around the world: http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=52fe4b51-45ab-4d5b-a168-c96cdac65462&st=2 http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=52fe... The one close to me is in Helsinki-Espoo: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8AJ4_Ursa_Model_of_the_Solar_System_Sun_Helsinki_Finland http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8AJ4_Ursa_Model_of_the_... But this one's slightly bigger, scale is o to billion. You can still see the Sun from Neptune, if you have binoculars (4487 meters, the Sun is 140cm in diameter).
- sasoon 14y agoHere is one in Zagreb, Croatia. Scale is 1:680,000,000. Sun is in the center of the town, and it is 2m in diameter. http://www.spottedbylocals.com/zagreb/zagreb-solar-system/ http://www.spottedbylocals.com/zagreb/zagreb-solar-system/
- ashwinaj 14y agoAwesome. Thumbs up!!
- rsingla 14y agoI'd love to see one of these for the other planets in our solar system. Maybe even Pluto!
- ldh 14y agoBeautiful, I love it!
- vadman 14y agoNot 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).
- zyb09 14y agoShouldn'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.
- vadman 14y agoNo, that's circumference - 3.14 * 12742 is approx. 40K. You are looking at the Earth side-on, so you only see the 2D projection of the half-equator. (EDIT: I think it should be "1D projection") Another nitpick - presumably our view axis is perpendicular to the solar system plane. The Earth would not look like in the picture, we would see one of the poles but slightly off-centered.
- JDGM 14y agoYou'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...)
- vadman 14y agoSo it's a bug after all :/ hope the author fixes it, such a neat idea otherwise.
- klenwell 14y agoOn the way to Mars, there was a flash and the screen went white. I guess I didn't make it.
- fusiongyro 14y agoWhat'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.
- izend 14y agoI like to imagine if Mars and Venus were swapped would Venus then be habitable?
- afreak 14y agoNo. Simply put: the core is likely solidified just like Mars and its magnetic field is very weak, causing the weather to be influenced by only its rotation and solar winds. It would be far more difficult to terraform than Mars really. Also a Venusian day is something like 5,800 hours and its surface temperature is capable of melting lead.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoWhere'd you get the idea that Venus has a solid core?
- incision 14y agoAn extrapolation from the weak magnetosphere [1] I'd guess. 1: http://www.universetoday.com/36161/core-of-venus/ http://www.universetoday.com/36161/core-of-venus/
- InclinedPlane 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Internal_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus#Internal_structure
- incision 14y agoI don't follow. What I posted above is simply a layman's summary of all the same things cited in your link.
- VLM 14y agoNicely done. A biology scaled version would be cool. Like if a virus was 100 pixels wide...
- petercooper 14y agoOr.. an electron is 100 pixels wide..
- InclinedPlane 14y agoBetter use a proton instead. Electrons are point-like particles, ignoring their wave characteristics, so don't have a "size" per se.
- VLM 14y agoCould make a cool animation showing off the fine structure constant going from classical electron radius to Bohr radius and Compton wavelength. That would be a total zoom factor of 18769 which is about right. The hard part would be designing an infographic to make sense to people who probably don't "get" what the bohr radius is, etc.
- bithive123 14y agohttp://htwins.net/scale2/ http://htwins.net/scale2/
- leeoniya 14y agorelated: interactive scale of the universe http://htwins.net/scale2/ http://htwins.net/scale2/
- jdechko 14y agoThe whole time I was browsing that (incredible) site, all I could think of was the intro to The Big Bang Theory.
- ErrantX 14y agoOh 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 http://www.starlincs.co.uk
- jacquesm 14y agoThat is super cool! Can you please ask him to put some larger images on there because I only get these tiny little thumbs.
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- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- aMoniker 14y agoA congenial 'fuck you' to the authors for crashing my entire OS. Cool idea though.
- brownbat 14y agoI'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#Farthest_humans_from_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Far... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth 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 14y agoI 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/ 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 :).
- X-Istence 14y agoEvery time I see that page it makes me realise just how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, and how badly I really want to go exploring everything that is out there.
- Ntrails 14y agoYet you could spend an entire lifetime exploring everything that is 'here', and still not manage it. Space is unfathomably big, and we are a grain of sand on the beach of the universe. But that grain of sand contains enough complexity and variety to fascinate for a practically unlimited period of time. Mars is cool, and grand, and inconceivably different. I'd rather see the cherry blossoms in Japan, or go for a walk in the outback, or see tierra del fuego (sp?). And really, it's not even just the big things on my (long) list, but the billion other little things that one can do and see on this world given time and resources to wander from place to place exploring and experiencing.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoBrilliant. I never actually reached mars - just the gut wrenching distance to the moon made me realise how amazing the Apollo program was - whatever gets us to Mars ...
- mark-r 14y agoI'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.
- MacG13r 14y agoVery Cool!!
- shardling 14y agoIt 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. :)
- guy2221 14y agoYou're talking about a first-person view, aren't you? But we don't start with that, we start with a third-person view of Earth and then "pan" across the sky... So wouldn't panning across the sky from whatever vantage point actually produce that movement? Same as when you point a telescope and pan, the stars move against your view...?
- shardling 14y agoHmm, I see what you're saying, but that's not what the demo is trying to convey. At one point it says "You're now traveling at [1/5 the speed of light]" -- that would be nonsense if it was conceived as a panning motion. e: Ah, but as someone else points out, the trip must actually exceed the speed of light, so the whole thing is nonsense. The author should recast things the way you describe them, and thus solve multiple problems at once.
- guy2221 14y agoLet's get to the bottom of this. It is a panning motion, this much is physically, visually true. Does it still make sense to talk about 'speed of motion'? Now I'm confused. What happens when you pan from the moon to the sun (during a new moon, when they're ostensibly both visible)? If you do it quite quickly you are panning faster than the speed of light? (In the interpretatio: 'if a physical object remained at the center of your scope as you panned, and started at the moon, it would have to move faster than the speed of light, to follow your pan?) So if you pan from one thing to another and they're 1 light-minute away and you take one minute to pan, does it make sense you are 'panning at the speed of light'? For something that leaves one object and goes toward another? What do you think of this?
- xdenser 14y agoit says it is traveling at 1/10 th of light speed. it takes less than minute to get to Mars in pixels, but from other sources I know it takes 13 minutes for radio signal to get to mars. Something does not play here.
- shardling 14y agoThis is at the closest pass, when Mars is ~0.5 AU away from the earth; that's 4 light minutes. It takes 13 minutes from light to get to Mars from the sun, and I think that'll also work out to be close to the "average" time from Earth to Mars. In any case, you're right that apparently the demo exceeds the speed of light at some point, because it doesn't last for 4 minutes. Someone else suggests that the motion be interpreted as a fast pan rather than a physical motion, which is how this should have been implemented to not contradict the laws of physics. :)
- crapshoot101 14y agovery cool - thank you.
- joeycastillo 14y agoOne 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.
- anonymfus 14y agoLike foreign country few hundreds revolutions of our planet around the Sun ago.
- Connaissance 14y agoGood point. We have so forgotten how bad it used to be, that 40 mins seems so long. Kings weren't able to talk to their ambassadors in 30 mins, not that very long ago.
- MrBra 14y agoif we could stretch a stick as long as the distance from earth to mars and use it to tap on mars ground something like a morse code to communicate, would that message be faster than a wifi message traveling at the speed of light?
- danielweber 14y agoDoes everyone come up with this idea independently, or is someone suggesting it? It's a very common retort to speed-of-light communications, but someone told me about it before I thought of it. Anyway, your idea wouldn't work. If you press on one end of the stick, it would issue a pressure wave along the length of the stick near the speed of light (depending on its material), so you haven't gained anything.
- MrBra 14y agoNo I am guilty of having thought about it myself :) But I would like to know more about these kind of anti-common sense examples regarding this subject. Do you have a website or some search keyword to suggest? Thanks
- rikacomet 14y agoplease also mark the Lagrange Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point plus Sun, that would be really cool!!
- DanBC 14y agoThe few pixels to the low Earth orbit and ISS is gently depressing. When's the last time a human went further than that? 1972?
- S4M 14y agoIt'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 14y agoIndeed, 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.
- pjungwir 14y agoHere 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/ http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/
- tankbot 14y agoThis 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...
- drewolbrich 14y agoIf it was a real photograph, I do not think you would see any stars in the frame. The Earth is extremely bright compared to the stars. If the exposure of the film/video (or your eyes) was set to portray the Earth at that brightness, you wouldn't see any stars. Example: http://www.astrobio.net/images/galleryimages_images/Gallery_Image_6633.jpg http://www.astrobio.net/images/galleryimages_images/Gallery_... This is a real image and is not CG. Another one: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-137-20957.jpg http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-1...
- tankbot 14y agoI like the accurate size/distance but it doesn't have to be a photorealistic representation for me. Pure black except for the earth/moon is boring for a desktop background, and stars are pretty ;o)
- millerm 14y agoThat'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.
- codeulike 14y agoThis 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 http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html edit: just large image: http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jpg http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jp...
- undershirt 14y agoYou can draw a circle in the palm of your hand, then a smaller circle on the other. Spread your arms out to your side, and that's about the distance from the earth to the moon. I would get that tattooed if I was into that kind of thing.
- calebegg 14y agoThis would depend heavily on the size of the circles.
- jlgreco 14y agoIndeed. With small enough tattoos you could put the Earth on your thumb and moon on your pinky.
- biot 14y agoOr the solar system tattooed up your leg. Starting with the Sun on your heel, and stopping at Uranus.
- morganwilde 14y agoI see what you did there... Clever.
- undershirt 14y agoI saw a scale model at an exhibit once. I put my hands over the earth and moon, and my wingspan covered it perfectly with both fitting inside my hands comfortable. I thought it was a very interesting way to illustrate it.
- crazygringo 14y agoVery rarely have I seen a single idea so perfectly illustrated. Impeccable timing and presentation. Unexpected, every step of the way. Kudos.
- larrydavid 14y agoYes this was really well executed. Kind of a shame to see a lot of the top comments dominated by the picking at any inaccuracy they can find (not surprising, it seems a trademark of HN these days). Ok it isn't a perfect scientific simulation but rather a rough visual guide to grasp the scale of space travel, and I think it achieves that well.
- stouset 14y agoThat's the thing: people are arguing that, as astonishing as the portayal seems, it still manages to give people a gross underestimation of how big these scales really are. As portrayed, it seems like it only takes a minute or so to get to Mars at 20% of the speed of light. But really, they continue speeding up the starfield to multiples of superluminal speeds. As great as that distance seems, it's even more than an order of magnitude larger than depicted.
- ohazi 14y agoIs 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...
- chm 14y agoDistances are in pixels, with the Earth's diameter being 100 px.
- aetherson 14y agoYes, he knows. But the point is: They say they're going 20% of the speed of light (in pixels). But the closest approach of Earth and Mars is about 4.35 light minutes away from each other. So if our virtual speed is 20% of the speed of light, it follows that the page should take more than 20 minutes to reach Mars. And it doesn't. It doesn't even take 4.35 minutes, so the page must be continuing to accelerate past the 20% c measure, to superluminal speeds, in order to finish in a couple of minutes or so. Which they don't mention.
- vacri 14y agoThe page flashes for me a couple of times, after which the starfield is still and then rapidly speeds up again. I assume this means that we're travelling with the assistance of warpgates or similar - and at 127km/pixel, it's unlikely that the warpgate or the ship would show on the map.
- shardling 14y agoNah, because if it's physical travel the starfield won't change at all. :P
- aqme28 14y agoTravelling 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.
- rkuester 14y agoCool site, but it's "If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, ..." http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i-were.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i... </pedantry>
- ckvamme 14y agoReally cool. Anything that sheds light on how amazingly double awesome the Mars Rover Mission is makes me happy.
- ikkyu 14y agoReminds me of this Bill Nye episode http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8
- broabprobe 14y agoSays we wont get to Mars until the 2030s, I think the Mars One project and others would beg to differ...
- biot 14y agoUsing this site, I was able to make the Kessel run in less than 1200 pixels.
- b_emery 14y agoIf the Earth radius was 100 pixels, the average depth of the ocean (~4km) would be less than 0.1 pixels. I once had a professor hold up piece of paper and say "this is my scale model of the pacific ocean". Took me a while to realize he wasn't joking.
- JDGM 14y agoThe one my teacher used was the billiard ball, and told us "if the Earth were the same size as this, it would be smoother". A quick google suggests that is indeed true, but it would not be rounder. (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/te...)
- Gravityloss 14y agoThe starfield should not move anyway, because of parallax. The stars are really far away and the sky looks the same on Mars and Earth.
- DavePaliwoda 14y agoHey 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 14y ago"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-get-to-mars/ http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...
- ttrreeww 14y agoShould have switched to warp 1.
- solox3 14y agoPerhaps this is relevant: Opera's rendering glitches mean that we cannot go to Mars with the latest version of Opera on Windows.
- T-hawk 14y agoMostly worked for me in Opera 12.14 on WinXP. The first click showed white space instead of stars, but then the second click (after the moon) showed the scrolling starfield the whole way.
- devgutt 14y agoWhy not? (function () { var d=1; setInterval(function () { $('#Earth-Illustration').css({'webkit-transform': 'rotate(' + ((d>36) ? d=2 : d++)*10 + 'deg)'})},100); }()); Please, consider Africa as Asia ;)
- eevee 14y agoPerhaps you meant `transform`, which will actually work in WebKit browsers (you forgot the leading `-`) and also be translated by jQuery to other browsers' prefixed property names.
- devgutt 14y agotested in Chrome only...and only "transform" didn't work, I had to add "webkit-" to work...to make simple, I prefered not put the moz line
- stcredzero 14y ago"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-get-to-mars/ http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...
- danielweber 14y agoYou 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.)
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoI like this. Good job, very creative!
- Unoeufisenough 14y agoMars is pretty far, but 240 days doesn't sound so bad. In the age of explorers, the first human sailors to circumnavigate the earth took 4 years to do it. A handful of them even survived the journey!
- KerrickStaley 14y agoMars is a desolate, inhospitable rock floating in an immense void. I can't understand why people are captivated by the idea of living there.
- bdunbar 14y agoI'm semi-captivated by the idea. I'm not spending my (ha) fortune on it, but if the opportunity presented itself, I'd go. You know how, for millennia, people have been drawn over the hill, to see new sites, live in places no one else has? That's why.
- stcredzero 14y agoIt has water, mineral resources, a CO2 atmosphere plentiful enough to consider using it as an industrial feedstock, soil that we know you can grow plants in, a 24 hour day/night cycle, and enough sunlight to support crops. It also is "closer" to the rest of the solar system in terms of delta-v. If civilization expands into the solar system, Mars will be analogous to North America in the 16-20th centuries.
- Mvandenbergh 14y ago>It has water, mineral resources, a CO2 atmosphere plentiful enough to consider using it as an industrial feedstock, soil that we know you can grow plants in, a 24 hour day/night cycle, and enough sunlight to support crops. Mars' atmosphere has only 20 times more CO2 than Earth's does, CO2 is not a rare chemical. We don't know enough about Martian soils to be sure that we can grow crops there. >Mars will be analogous to North America in the 16-20th centuries. I see this analogy around a lot and I've never cared for it. 1) All successful settlements of Europeans in the new world had some economic purpose for existing. The first few attempts to settle North America by English settlers were dismal failures until they discovered that they could grow valuable tobacco there. What is Mars' tobacco? We'd need a product that is cheaper to manufacture on Mars and ship back to Earth than to make on Earth. We need this because... 2) Mars is a vastly more hostile environment than the new world. It would have been possible to set up fairly small colonisation groups that were mostly if not entirely self-sufficient and thus didn't need to find economically sustainable products to sell to the home country in trade for vital supplies. In fact, later settlement in New England followed this pattern - many people paid for their passage and bought some land and only needed a few imported goods rather than the whole-sale re-supply that the earlier settlers in Virginia had required. The minimum local knowledge and technology base was essentially simple agriculture at first, followed by some village-level craftsmen for simple tools and such. This meant that only a small fraction of the local economy had to produce goods for export because most things could be produced locally. That is very far from being the case on Mars. The minimum technology base required to have a mostly independent colony on Mars is a substantial fraction of our entire tech base on earth. Even if we assume that high-complexity, high value-density things like computers and other electronics are imported from Earth that still leaves us with a lot that needs to be made on Mars. If we want to build another settlement on Mars from our initial base, can we do that? Can we build the environmental management equipment needed? Pressure envelopes, power generation and distribution? Even something like light bulbs would be hard to do. Individually, all of these things are totally possible of but when you add them all together you start to require an awful lot of machinery to take with you. The alternative of course is to keep supplying these things from Earth but without a sustainable source of goods to export back to Earth that isn't going to be sustainable. 3) The relative cost of transportation. Early settlers of the new world could use existing ships once they knew where to go. With Mars we know where to go but we don't have the ships. A moderately wealthy merchant could pay for the passage of his whole extended family to the Americas, even if the price drops dramatically that isn't going to be the case with a passage to Mars. None of this is to say that I don't want to see permanent human settlement on other planets, but I think that comparing it to the settlement of the Americas is very unhelpful.
- CmdrKrool 14y agoCool. 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 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816917 Fine on Chrome though.
- acqq 14y agoSo one more site that works only in Chrome. Sad.
- vjk2005 14y agoThough not as cool as this, I used a similar scrolling idea back in 2011 to visualize a star that was one million times the mass of our sun — http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-million-times-the-mass-of-our-sun-was http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-mill...
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- pjungwir 14y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned the scale model of the solar system strewn around the Boston metro area. If you live there, it's pretty fun to visit all the planets. One year the MIT Mystery Hunt had a puzzle related to it.
- igorgue 14y agoMars is fucking far.
- stuntgoat 14y agoI'd really like to see something like this for the anatomy of a cell! Nice work!
- mprinz 14y agoGreat stuff! Would be great to see some other planets or facts in there.
- brass9 14y agoAmazing! Despite the factual inaccuracies, it's a wonderful job! Two thumbs up!
- ygra 14y agoA little strange handling of the class attribute in source. I'm fairly sure it also requires an = after it.
- Aardwolf 14y agoIf the Earth were 100 pixels wide, then what we consider "space" is 1 pixel above its surface. One pixel...
- maurits 14y agoMy favourite scale of the universe picture: http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg
- chrislomax 14y agoNever seen that image before, that is quite scary really. When people state that there is no such thing as aliens really annoys me when you see visualisations such as this.
- yen223 14y agoThere's almost definitely aliens out there. The question is, will we ever get to meet them?
- captainbenises 14y agoOf course we will, just will it be in the next 100 years, the next 1,000 or the next 10,000?
- dennisgorelik 14y agoIt could be more than 10+ million years from now. By that time civilization on Earth would be indistinguishable from aliens from our 21st century perspective.
- kyrias 14y agoSome of the fonts look horrible in FF20/Linux x86-64..
- rplst8 14y agoI'm glad he didn't decide to do distancetobrunomars.com
- chloraphil 14y agoDid anyone else make the return trip and get disappointed there was no "welcome home"?
- angrybeak 14y agoAnd only 53 pixels wide? Is it even worth going there?
- romeonova 14y agoI was hoping to see something new on the way back from Mars. well done though!
- tahoecoder 14y agoYou should speed up the rate a bit when going to mars, and just tell the user that the velocity is higher now. It takes up too much of our time, to be honest.
- triplesec 14y agoBug Report: I'm afraid this crashed between the Moon and Mars, just as some "you are travelling" text came in on the LHS and then it just went to whitescreen. Firefox 19.0.2 on Win7-64Home. In case you can catch it. (yeah ok so my laptop's not Linux, sue me!)
- bobiambob 14y agoView in Safari on iPad, and change tabs while scrolling, then come back mid-scroll. Gotta love the iPad rendering.
- mysteryleo 14y agoI was thinking there'd be a scary monster that would pop out along the way