
If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - cdevroe
http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
======
zrail
As I was scrolling through I started to notice a really nice, subtle star
background pattern that wasn't moving. I thought that was a really nice touch.

And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust.

There's a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.

~~~
MattHeard
I can imagine a dead pixel would be like your spaceship.

~~~
e_proxus
"That's no moon..."

------
mrmaddog
Somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, I had to resort to

    
    
       $(".essay").each(function(i){console.log($(this).text())});
    

to read the fun little text snippets. I like how it got fairly
philosophical—everything eventually turns to philosophy if you are stranded
out in space. Thanks for putting this together; it was a nice take on the
perspective of our universe.

~~~
nacs
And here's the output of that command for those interested:

[http://pastie.org/pastes/8863556/text](http://pastie.org/pastes/8863556/text)

~~~
TophWells
And by interested, you mean lazy.

Thanks!

------
Arjuna
If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, _" Might as well stop
now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see
anything else."_

For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately
where you would expect to find _Proxima Centauri._

However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way
(between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Sedna and Voyager
1, to name a (non-exhaustive) few.

~~~
mmanfrin
One of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe;
does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our
planetary system?

If so, that is _much_ closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that
the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets
(although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous
relative to the distance to other planets in our system).

~~~
widdma
I'm not sure where you went wrong, but your original notion was correct!

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Distance+to+Proxima+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Distance+to+Proxima+Centauri%29+%2F+%28Distance+from+the+Sun+to+Pluto%29)

------
sneak
*were

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood)

~~~
ezequiel-garzon
I'm not a native speaker, but I had the impression this shift to "were"
happens less in the UK than in the US. Is that so?

~~~
mathieuh
I speak British English and it's more a matter of register for me. If I'm
writing something formal I'll use the subjunctive, if I'm talking to friends
I'll just stick with the indicative.

If I saw someone write "it is necessary that he goes" in a paper it would
stick out as strange to me, likewise if I heard someone say "it is necessary
that he go" it would sound overly formal and a bit stilted.

So really, you can use either and be understood perfectly well. It only seems
to annoy prescriptivists, and I would say one has a moral obligation to annoy
prescriptivists anyway.

~~~
anon4
> one has a moral obligation to annoy prescriptivists anyway

And that's a cause I can really get behind.

------
jostmey
Quote: "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to
eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent
steak, I was a little busy. I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way
to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."

------
pak
For a similar visualization of the human genome, and to get a sense of how
vast that landscape is, check out this genome browser I made a couple years
ago:

[http://chromozoom.org](http://chromozoom.org)

At the lowest zoom level, one pixel is 280,000 bp (roughly the length of one
or two genes, including noncoding segments). You can zoom all the way into the
individual base pairs (a, c, t, and g).

There is a track below the chromosome cartoon (cartogram) that shows you the
genes if you pull down on its label.

------
ColinWright
I have previously wandered along the scale model of the solar system on the St
Kilda beach in Melbourne. Yesterday I did the same with the scale model in
Bonn. In both cases I only got as far as Uranus.

It was interesting along the way to verify Kepler's relationship between the
orbital period and the distance. Saturn takes about 30 years to go around, and
is about 30^(2/3) ~ 10 times the distance. Jupiter takes about 12 years to go
around and is about 12^(2/3) ~ 5.2 the distance.

Standing by the plinth with the Earth and the Moon, looking back at the Sun,
then forward to Mars, and not being able to see Jupiter really does give a
true sense of the scale.

Not to diminish this effort, but getting out and walking the distances make a
difference.

~~~
mark-r
When I was a kid I wanted to make such a scale model. I think I calculated
sizes with Earth = 1 inch, and the distances made the mind boggle. Using a
pixel as a unit of measure was pure genius, it makes the model so much more
manageable without detracting from the overall grand scale.

------
danbruc
1\. Nice.

2\. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost?

3\. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not
look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but
it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.

~~~
opminion
3\. Correct, and not knowing anything about the author I would venture that
the reason is that he uses imperial in his everyday life, and thus it has been
a concession to the wider world to do this in metric, for which I am grateful
:-)

Citation for "lowercase m for meters":
[http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html](http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html)

~~~
cal2
I'm American, so I use imperial units in my everyday life. I'm also a
(bio)chemist, so I do use metric units about as often as I do imperial units.
While I might be slightly biased ("M" is molarity gosh dangit), I don't think
I would confuse "M" for "meters (m)" simply _because_ I use imperial units in
my everyday life.

I bring this up simply because I've seen a few comments over the past few days
to the tone of "imperial sucks" and "imperial is clearly inferior."

To me, I only see using imperial units as an advantage. As Americans, the
metric system is already hammered into our heads in grammar school anyways.
Some might see it as Americans being uninformed or accustomed to antiquated
methods, but I see it as Americans being able to speak two languages (at least
the Americans I'm most familiar with).

~~~
opminion
_I only see using imperial units as an advantage_

Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view, other
than being able to communicate to other people who use the same system, at the
cost of not being understood by everyone else?

(What I heard in the UK during the supermarket transition to metric a decade
ago: imperial uses fractions, which is a useful to grasp for learning
children, etc. But I'm surely misquoting so don't worry about this argument)

I am asking because I only come across the imperial system when watching
Mythbusters or reading a book about the Space Shuttle, or someone tells me
their weight in stones, which always leaves me rather puzzled.

This is just out of curiosity, I'm not trying to work anyone up.

~~~
cal2
> Out of genuine curiosity, what's the advantage from your point of view,
> other than being able to communicate to other people who use the same
> system, at the cost of not being understood by everyone else?

What other advantage, you ask? Well, I'd say that there is none. I was merely
trying to convey that being fluent in both imperial and metric is better than
being fluent in only metric. As long as it doesn't hurt me (which imperial
doesn't) the more skill-sets I have, the better!

I hope you better see where I'm coming from now. You didn't work me up though,
and I also didn't mean to work anyone up either. :)

------
romaniv
Funny. It feels like an adventure game, it illustrates a point, and it's just
a static page. I even checked, it works perfectly fine without JavaScript.
Great example of what can be achieved with good design. I can't help to
mentally contrast this with what people call "web apps" these days that use
extremely complicated client-side code to communicate far less interesting
things, and often do it badly anyway.

~~~
jgw
It did to me, too. It has some of the mood of my all-time favourite piece of
Interactive Fiction - heck, of any fiction.

Photopia
([http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html](http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html))

It's my hope that one soul, somewhere, will discover this today. That would
make me happy. :)

~~~
romaniv
Always meant to play Photopian, but didn't get to it so far. After this
reminder there is a higher probability that I will.

------
sp332
I remember Bill Nye doing this in one episode. He had the earth as a golf
ball, I think? He was running around a soccer field showing the planets. And
he drove miles away to show where Pluto would be.

Edit: this episode!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250)

Edit2: nope, this one (guess he liked this trick lol)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325)
Pluto is only 100 meters away, but Alpha Centauri is 700 km away!

~~~
NortySpock
Actually, in that one, the earth was the size of the ball of a ball-point pen.

The sun was the size of a soccer ball.

------
acheron
"were".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood)

~~~
ColinWright
But this should not use the subjunctive, because he has indeed drawn an image
using the scale of the Moon being one pixel wide. This shows it's possible,
and hence the subjunctive is inappropriate.

~~~
chimeracoder
That's not really correct. Even if we assume that this is no longer a
hypothetical/counterfactual case, then the correct grammar is to use the
present tense ("This is the moon as one pixel"). But, in this case, it still
is counterfactual. This is really short for "If the moon were only [the size
of] a single pixel", a statement which we know is not correct.

You're probably confusing this with the rule surrounding verifiable facts (ie,
"I asked John if he was happy").

~~~
ColinWright
Quoting from the Wikipedia page:

    
    
        Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to
        express various states of unreality such as wish,
        emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity,
        or action that has not yet occurred.
    

The action has occurred, it is not an unreality. It seems to me that using the
subjunctive would be inappropriate.

And yes, perhaps using the present tense would be more appropriate. Certainly
I would have used something like:

    
    
        The solar system plotted on a scale where the Moon is one pixel.
    

My comment still stands - the subjunctive is inappropriate. Saying it should
be still something else does not make that less true.

<Shrug /> It's the interwebs, people will write what they like, and declare
that nothing is right, and nothing is wrong, it's all OK. In that case telling
someone to use the subjunctive seems doubly inappropriate.

[https://xkcd.com/386/](https://xkcd.com/386/)

~~~
marukokinno
English is not my native language, but using "was" sounds pretty weird to me.
In latin languages, when a sentence starts with "if" and the verb is in a past
tense form, it must be the subjunctive form of the past tense. I remember in
primary school they teach the past of the subjunctive with "if" before all the
pronouns. Don't know how they teach the past of the subjunctive in English
though.

------
sicher
Here is another pretty cool solar system scale model:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System)

Some photos here: [http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-
sol...](http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-solar-system-
spans-the-length-of-sweden)

~~~
cschmidt
Maine has a scale model solar system about 40 miles across. I drive by it
every summer.

[http://pages.umpi.edu/~nmms/solar/](http://pages.umpi.edu/~nmms/solar/)

------
deadfall
Nice way to see that my computer monitor is very dirty.

------
silentOpen
Nit: kM -> km; meters are abbreviated 'm', usually.

~~~
narag
Since this story seems to be nit territory, another one: 'm' is not an
abbreviation, but a _symbol_. That's why you don't write a dot after it.

------
shmerl
Nice presentation, but the need to stop and read the text breaks the
experience. It can be improved so that text could fly alongside the viewer for
some time. I.e. so one wouldn't have to stop the flight to read it.

------
Symmetry
Pluto but not Ceres? That's just discrimination based on historical inequity!

------
mattquiros
Anybody else get the feeling that we're probably stuck and will all die here
on Earth? While scrolling through all that empty space, I was thinking about
interstellar travel. I imagine it'll eventually be as easy and commonplace as
we see in sci-fi, but I'm having a moment of doubt we'll ever get there, or if
there's any point out-living the home planet.

~~~
Wohui
I've always felt that way, thanks to the voyagers (37 years and the two little
unmanned projectiles have managed to move 16 light hours). My dad always tried
to tell me we're just waiting for the next scientific breakthrough. Either
way, I think we desperately need to take care of earth; I can't think of an
analogy but the earlier we move to take care of earth, the greater the
extension to the time we have.

~~~
userulluipeste
Things have evolved in the meantime and I think with current technology newer
unmanned projectiles can be sent to surpass the 37-year old unmanned
spacecraft, if that would be a goal. To take those "16 light hours" as a
benchmark is not fair.

------
jmpeax
This has the same effect on me as writing out all the zeros in larger numbers,
rather than in scientific notation, and then zooming in to see only about 3
zeros at the same time and asking me to scroll through them.

Even without the horrible "zoom in", the size loses meaning and I can't tell
how big it is, because humans think in logarithmic scales. I can't really
estimate the difference in size by glancing at the number of zeros written out
for 10^27 or 10^80 (maybe unless they were above and below each other, and
then I would say it's between 2 and 3 times difference in orders of
magnitude... again logarithmic thinking!). One is the number of atoms in the
human body, the other is the number of atoms in the observable universe, so
the difference really can't be appreciated by glancing at the number of zeros.

Given me logarithmic scales for comparing and estimating sizes any day.

~~~
adnrw
I found this really helpful insofar as grasping orders of magnitude of big
numbers:

1 thousand seconds is 16.7 minutes 1 million seconds is 11.6 days 1 billion
seconds is 31.6 years

In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat
tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much
more.

~~~
lutusp
> In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat
> tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much
> more.

Another way to think about these scaling ratios is to realize that a billion
is a thousand times larger than a million.

Billion = 10^9

Million = 10^6

9 - 6 = 3. 10^3 = 1000

------
jon_black
If the moon WERE only 1 pixel...you know...because it's not. :)

------
kenperkins
Really neat. I enjoyed scrolling to earth. After that it became painful.

Thankfully, the solution was easy:

Open Chrome Inspector Console:

$('.essay').css({ left: '20px', marginBottom: '15px', maxWidth: '600px',
position: 'relative' });

$('#bigspace').css('left','inherit');

~~~
TomAnthony
I just used the shortcut buttons at the top. Your solution is more fun. :)

------
rafifyalda
I found this to be a peaceful late-night experience. I put the window to
fullscreen to avoid all other distractions, rotated my Magic Mouse 90º, and
just smooth scrolled through the story. Really nice.

------
marquis
".. we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny
shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real. The mental models provided by
mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast
distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying"

Abstraction is where our imagination lights up, where we make art and fall in
love and build things. These empty spaces, it's where we find that these
brains that evolved to escape Jaguars and find food, are actually pretty
amazing in themselves.

------
Wohui
Some predecessors, just out of interest:

[http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/](http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/)
This page has been kicking around for ages, not sure how long though.

[http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/](http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/)
More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although
all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)

~~~
fhars
And the dead tree version:
[http://www.mishkahenner.com/Astronomical](http://www.mishkahenner.com/Astronomical)

------
JCordeiro
Nicely done! I've always wanted to build something like this, and have never
gotten around to it. I can't imagine it would have ended up as good as this.

------
dpcx
Neat comparison. But it would be nice if there was something on the initial
screen that suggested scrolling. I just thought that a black page locked
Safari.

------
pkulak
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8)

------
jonhmchan
This is very cool - I love demonstrations like this that show the scale of
incomprehensible scales. It's always fascinating.

~~~
rwl4
I agree. This was a beautiful illustration of our solar system. I especially
liked the running narrative. ;-)

------
rafeed
I made it about halfway past Saturn before I gave up scrolling. Nice work.

One comment: If you're using km for the distance units, you might as well
stick with it (metric) for all the other examples like 75 mi/hr and 475 ft to
be more consistent. Better yet, an option to switch the units between imperial
and metric would be pretty cool.

------
arrrg
There is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for
a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty
much the entire city.

It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the
solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.

~~~
lifeformed
How big is the Sun model on that walk?

~~~
ColinWright
Just over a metre, slightly smaller than the one on St Kilda beach in
Melbourne.

------
jmnicolas
Now I understand why going to Mars is such an expedition. If real karma
exists, the author deserves a good dose !

~~~
lmm
If you want to get an intuitive feel for the orbital mechanics I highly
recommend Kerbal Space Program.

------
acknowledge
As someone new to web development, simple creative websites are great
inspiration and fun to learn from.

------
GotAnyMegadeth
My friend pointed out:

"When pressing the right arrow key, the digits at the bottom are spinning
really fast apart from the most significant numbers at the front and the 3rd
digit from the right which, curiously, slowly counts backwards without missing
any digit"

------
cwyers
This really drives home to me how frustrating it is that Chrome has gotten rid
of the OS scrollbar widget on Windows and replaced it with some non-native
thing. It's one of several annoyances that are making me think of going back
to IE.

~~~
shmerl
Why not Firefox?

------
neves
Saturn rings should have been draw from an upper view. They would be too thin
to display.

------
Florin_Andrei
Well, you could go outside and do it with marbles and soccer balls:

[http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-
solar...](http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar-system-
really)

------
bunkat
I tried to use the scrollbar to scroll but I never landed on anything but
empty space. While it did perfectly show off the vastness and emptiness of the
universe, it probably was not the intended result.

------
state
I can't help it. Everything like this reminds me of Powers of Ten [1].

1 -
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0)

------
SeanDav
Don't know if I should be embarrassed or proud that I manually scrolled all
the way past Uranus before giving up!

My favourite quote: "... once nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to
exist"

------
userulluipeste
It's ironic to read «The brain isn't built to handle "empty."» remark having
«How to meditate» (that aims to empty your mind/thoughts) on HN front-page.

------
vampirebat
Another implementation (scroll down instead of to the right):

[http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/](http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/)

------
K0nserv
Too much time was spent on this last night, but here it is
[http://jsfiddle.net/yrFK4/](http://jsfiddle.net/yrFK4/)

------
stcredzero
Back in the late 70's, when I was in grade school, I used to make maps with
just about the same scale with rolls of my dad's thermal printer paper.

------
Thiz
Place an orange on the floor, ten feet (3m) away place a cherry.

Earth and moon.

Walk away a thousand yards (1km) and place a 30ft (10m) high pumpkin.

That's how big the sun is and how far it is from us.

* aprox scale

------
jc_dntn
Should this not be "If the moon were..."?

------
aamirabro
Log scales are for quitters, relevant xckd:
[http://xkcd.com/1162/](http://xkcd.com/1162/)

------
_dark_matter_
Are you kidding me? Sideways scroll with no way to use my scroll wheel? It's
choppy and unreadable scrolling using the scrollbar, and using the right arrow
is just too slow.

~~~
ndcrandall
Just a hint shift+scroll wheel in a lot of cases will scroll horizontally.

~~~
werdnapk
shift+scroll appears to scroll me back and forth in my browser history (Using
FF).

~~~
evacuationdrill
I've always used alt+scroll for horizontal scrolling.

Edit: doesn't seem to work on the linked page

~~~
onli
Yep it doesn't. So actually, on chrome, without an autoscroll extension, there
is no way to scroll that page (apart from the with the right cursor button,
which is way to slow to actually be valid) on a normal desktop pc. Happy new
world.

~~~
graedus
shift + mousewheel works for me in chrome (windows 7 and osx)

------
Hannan
"...or super-powers in a sic[sic]-fi series that you're watching late at
night..."

------
Lilme
This is major tom to ground control, "Im floating in a most peculiar way."

------
rajeemcariazo
Summary: Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the
space!

------
fallinghawks
Thanks for including Pluto (technically not a planet but still one in my
mind).

~~~
lmm
If one's going to include Pluto it would be nice to have Ceres, which was also
cruelly stripped of its planetary status.

------
NAFV_P
Jupiter, yeah right... HN articles are received nearly 35 minutes late.

------
ryanmcbride
I had to come read the comments to figure out why I was just seeing a black
screen that wasn't scrollable. Sideways scrolling? Really? There's a reason no
one uses it.

~~~
chuckwnelson
We usually put lengths along an X axis when graphing, I believe this is why
horizontal scrolling was used.

We also tend to think of our planets in order from left to right from the sun.

If this was about ocean depth, vertical scrolling might be more analogous.

But its all subjective of course.

------
vittore
Good idea for toilet paper

------
rlu
does the mouse scroll wheel work for you guys? Not for me ... :(

------
zoobert
really cool. Nice work love it. Will show it to my son

------
dorfuss
I cheated :)

~~~
Wohui
I used the warp drive console at the top. "Engage"

------
Kenji
I feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation
between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You
can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else
the map gets even larger.

~~~
hrjet
To wrap my mind around it, I try to imagine astronomical objects as everyday
objects. For example, if Sun was a base-ball in my hand, the earth would be a
mote of dust some throwable distance away. My favorite one is: if Sun was the
size of a grain of sand, the nearest start would be another grain of sand 30
kms away!

~~~
pantalaimon
relevant what-if: [http://what-if.xkcd.com/83/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/83/)

