If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)
(joshworth.com)904 points by sdoering 3 days ago
904 points by sdoering 3 days ago
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.
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.
> 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.
There's a great video is saw. In 30 minutes it goes through the entire lifespan of the universe.
Even after all the stars die, the white dwarfs will continue to glow. And after eons, the last black holes will evaporate. The point is that the age of stars is only a tiny fraction of the lifetime of the universe. Maybe the speed of light makes sense at that scale.
But... I'm not happy with that theory. In a relatively short amount of time the expansion of the universe will increase faster then the speed of light. Which means it will be impossible to ever get information from the other side of the universe.
I find it very unreasonable that the universe imposes a speed limit on everything and then completely ignores it.
We have a long way to go before we learn to move a star (or a rosette).
> 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.
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.
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.
Don't forget gravity drive. No more Gs. And the same technology would give us real artificial gravity, not this nauseous rotation artificial gravity.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "A photon instantly travels to the end of time"
Please explain this. TIA
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.
10,000 years of empty space to get to the next solar system. Exciting.
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?
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_...
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.
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?
Luckily FTL communication isn't actually impossible and special relativity only applies to energy and mass.
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…)
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.
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...
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have come full circle. I'd imagine that px uses a surprising amount of abstraction.
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
It's very very good! I thought this one hit hard though, I assume inspired by the moon = 1-pixel viz.
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.
On the same note: https://xkcd.com/980/ (from 2011 when Bezos "only" had $18b)
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.
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.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)
Surprisingly the precision used in those encoded values is enough at 1000km per pixel (I checked).
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.")
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]
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.
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)
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.
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.
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…
and even this is not making it super tangible, because the speed of light to monkey brains is basically infinite.
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.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
I'm thankful that the view-source: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
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.
Previous discussions (there are many!)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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??
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.
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 .
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.
Reminds me of a 23 mile long model of the solar system in Madison https://www.astro.wisc.edu/outreach/planet-trek/
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.
somewhat defeats the point I think (but they are at the top if you really want to)
It's not space that's big and out of reach, it's just us living too fast.
sit back and relax for my 1px review
tedious=true, basicallyLame=true, is1px=false
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...
I'm not sure we'd be capable of receiving any signal it sent back to us, would we?
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.
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.