
If the Earth were 100 pixels wide - oseibonsu
http://www.distancetomars.com/
======
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/List_of_spaceflight_records#Farthest_humans_from_Earth)

<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 :).

~~~
X-Istence
Every 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
Yet 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.

~~~
khafra
Space is boring. Flyunder territory.

------
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...

~~~
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.

~~~
jarek
Does anyone else have a realistic more aggressive timeline?

~~~
jrockway
I'm planning to head over tomorrow. I'll let you know how it goes.

~~~
alex_doom
Are you there yet?

~~~
jrockway
Yes. HN is loading slower than normal, however, so you'll have to wait for a
full assessment. This whole three-way handshake thing is not such a great idea
from Mars.

------
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. :)

~~~
millerm
How about you just imagine the ship is rotating on an axis for artificial
gravity generation. Then, if you were looking out the window, you would see
the starfield whizzing by. :-)

Edited for smiley.

~~~
vacri
Interesting idea - all the scifi I've ever seen has had ships rotating around
the axis of travel, but never orthogonal to it.

~~~
millerm
The axis wouldn't matter. You wouldn't notice which direction you were going
(well I suppose if you noticed the sun, darn).

------
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.

~~~
marcosdumay
You 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.

~~~
ajays
Isn't there such a thing in downtown Ithaca?

~~~
ptaipale
Apparently yes, <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=52fe...](http://www.waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=52fe4b51-45ab-4d5b-a168-c96cdac65462&st=2)

The one close to me is in Helsinki-Espoo:
[http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8AJ4_Ursa_Model_of_the_...](http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8AJ4_Ursa_Model_of_the_Solar_System_Sun_Helsinki_Finland)
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).

------
rkuester
Cool site, but it's "If the Earth _were_ 100 pixels wide, ..."

[http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-
was-i...](http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i-
were.aspx)

</pedantry>

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

------
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...](http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jpg)

~~~
undershirt
You 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
This would depend heavily on the size of the circles.

~~~
jlgreco
Indeed. With small enough tattoos you could put the Earth on your thumb and
moon on your pinky.

~~~
biot
Or the solar system tattooed up your leg. Starting with the Sun on your heel,
and stopping at Uranus.

~~~
morganwilde
I see what you did there... Clever.

------
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/>

~~~
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...

~~~
drewolbrich
If 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_...](http://www.astrobio.net/images/galleryimages_images/Gallery_Image_6633.jpg)
This is a real image and is not CG.

Another one:
[http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-1...](http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-137-20957.jpg)

~~~
tankbot
I 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)

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

~~~
larrydavid
Yes 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
That'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.

------
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-...](http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-
mars/)

------
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...)

~~~
vadman
So it's a bug after all :/ hope the author fixes it, such a neat idea
otherwise.

------
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.

~~~
acqq
So one more site that works _only_ in Chrome. Sad.

------
maurits
My favourite scale of the universe picture:

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

~~~
chrislomax
Never 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
There's almost definitely aliens out there. The question is, will we ever get
to meet them?

~~~
captainbenises
Of course we will, just will it be in the next 100 years, the next 1,000 or
the next 10,000?

~~~
dennisgorelik
It 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.

------
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-...](http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-to-
mars/)

~~~
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

~~~
mark-r
I tried simulating it, and it's just enough curvature to get the point across.
Assuming I didn't have a bug of course.

------
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/Floating_city_\(science_fiction\)#Venus)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities)

~~~
redblacktree
Really cool. Thanks.

I also find it awesome that this man's name is Landis. Only two characters
away from Lando (Calrissian), who also lived in a floating city.

------
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.

~~~
MrBra
if 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
Does 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
No 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

------
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>

~~~
jacquesm
That is super cool! Can you please ask him to put some larger images on there
because I only get these tiny little thumbs.

------
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...

~~~
petercooper
Or.. an electron is 100 pixels wide..

~~~
InclinedPlane
Better use a proton instead.

Electrons are point-like particles, ignoring their wave characteristics, so
don't have a "size" per se.

~~~
VLM
Could 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.

------
rsingla
I'd love to see one of these for the other planets in our solar system. Maybe
even Pluto!

------
pjungwir
I'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.

------
biot
Using this site, I was able to make the Kessel run in less than 1200 pixels.

------
3327
if I leave it running will I get to mars? just out of curiosity? ( i do have
better things to do ).

~~~
jerf
Or you can turn off Javascript and hit the "End" key. Alas, there does not
seem to be any real-life equivalent to that.

~~~
3327
Scotty is yet to invent the warp teleportation theory...

------
lifeisstillgood
Brilliant. 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 ...

------
vjk2005
Though 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-
mill...](http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-million-
times-the-mass-of-our-sun-was)

------
Aardwolf
If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, then what we consider "space" is 1 pixel
above its surface. One pixel...

------
triplesec
Bug 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!)

------
b_emery
If 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
The 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/te...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/ten-
things-you-dont-know-about-the-earth))

------
devgutt
Why 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
Perhaps 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
tested 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

------
klenwell
On the way to Mars, there was a flash and the screen went white. I guess I
didn't make it.

------
Unoeufisenough
Mars 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!

------
tahoecoder
You 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.

------
KerrickStaley
Mars is a desolate, inhospitable rock floating in an immense void. I can't
understand why people are captivated by the idea of living there.

~~~
stcredzero
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. 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
>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.

~~~
stcredzero
> CO2 is not a rare chemical.

Never said it was. The point is, that you can just pull it out of the Martian
air in industrial quantities.

> We don't know enough about Martian soils to be sure that we can grow crops
> there.

Many experts would disagree.

> All successful settlements of Europeans in the new world had some economic
> purpose for existing.

Yes, there would be a considerable initial economic barrier. But given the
potential payoff, and that it's well within the budgets of current major
powers, it's bound to happen. Just a matter of time and political will.

> Even something like light bulbs would be hard to do.

With current tech, we need a population of about 500 million to sustain a
comparable technological infrastructure. This is going to go down with
advances in technology, however.

> 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.

Because you're mistakenly using the analogy as a descriptor of difficulty.
You're right that it's much more difficult in both an absolute and comparative
sense. However, it's meant entirely as a descriptor of potential payoff.
Compare the investment involved in establishing initial colonies and the value
of interventions that resulted in British hegemony over North America with the
value generated by the US economy. For English speaking western civilization,
the payoff has been astoundingly huge.

I strongly suspect that there are people in China and other emerging powers
who are well aware of this as well.

~~~
KerrickStaley
What I had in mind when writing the original post is that there are many
places on _Earth_ that are far more accommodating which we will probably end
up settling first (e.g. Antarctica, Siberia, the surface of the ocean, and all
the interstices between where people are already living)

~~~
stcredzero
_> What I had in mind when writing the original post is that there are many
places on Earth that are far more accommodating which we will probably end up
settling first_

It's not a matter of "how accommodating." It's a matter of how accessible.
It's the space equivalent of geography. There are vast energy and material
resources in the solar system off-Earth. A Mars-centric civilization will have
much better access to those than an Earth-centric one.

------
Gravityloss
The starfield should not move anyway, because of parallax. The stars are
really far away and the sky looks the same on Mars and Earth.

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ikkyu
Reminds me of this Bill Nye episode

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8>

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solox3
Perhaps this is relevant: Opera's rendering glitches mean that we cannot go to
Mars with the latest version of Opera on Windows.

~~~
T-hawk
Mostly 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.

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leeoniya
related: interactive scale of the universe <http://htwins.net/scale2/>

~~~
jdechko
The whole time I was browsing that (incredible) site, all I could think of was
the intro to The Big Bang Theory.

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bobiambob
View in Safari on iPad, and change tabs while scrolling, then come back mid-
scroll. Gotta love the iPad rendering.

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ckvamme
Really cool. Anything that sheds light on how amazingly double awesome the
Mars Rover Mission is makes me happy.

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ygra
A little strange handling of the class attribute in source. I'm fairly sure it
also requires an = after it.

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broabprobe
Says we wont get to Mars until the 2030s, I think the Mars One project and
others would beg to differ...

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chloraphil
Did anyone else make the return trip and get disappointed there was no
"welcome home"?

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xdenser
it 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
This 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. :)

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stuntgoat
I'd really like to see something like this for the anatomy of a cell! Nice
work!

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brass9
Amazing! Despite the factual inaccuracies, it's a wonderful job! Two thumbs
up!

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romeonova
I was hoping to see something new on the way back from Mars. well done though!

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mysteryleo
I was thinking there'd be a scary monster that would pop out along the way

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mprinz
Great stuff! Would be great to see some other planets or facts in there.

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rikacomet
please also mark the Lagrange Points
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point>

plus Sun, that would be really cool!!

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ldh
Beautiful, I love it!

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rplst8
I'm glad he didn't decide to do distancetobrunomars.com

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angrybeak
And only 53 pixels wide? Is it even worth going there?

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kyrias
Some of the fonts look horrible in FF20/Linux x86-64..

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dinkumthinkum
I like this. Good job, very creative!

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MacG13r
Very Cool!!

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crapshoot101
very cool - thank you.

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ashwinaj
Awesome. Thumbs up!!

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ttrreeww
Should have switched to warp 1.

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igorgue
Mars is fucking far.

