If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

As I was scrolling through I started to notice a really nice, subtle star background pattern that wasn&#x27;t moving. I thought that was a really nice touch.<p>And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust.<p>There&#x27;s a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.

Somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, I had to resort to<p><pre><code> $(&quot;.essay&quot;).each(function(i){console.log($(this).text())}); </code></pre> 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.

If you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, <i>&quot;Might as well stop now. We&#x27;ll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else.&quot;</i><p>For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find <i>Proxima Centauri.</i><p>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.

*were<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subjunctive_mood</a>

Quote: &quot;Sorry, Humanity,&quot; says Evolution. &quot;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.&quot;

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:<p><a href="http://chromozoom.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chromozoom.org</a><p>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).<p>There is a track below the chromosome cartoon (cartogram) that shows you the genes if you pull down on its label.

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.<p>It was interesting along the way to verify Kepler&#x27;s relationship between the orbital period and the distance. Saturn takes about 30 years to go around, and is about 30^(2&#x2F;3) ~ 10 times the distance. Jupiter takes about 12 years to go around and is about 12^(2&#x2F;3) ~ 5.2 the distance.<p>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.<p>Not to diminish this effort, but getting out and walking the distances make a difference.

1. Nice.<p>2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost?<p>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.

Funny. It feels like an adventure game, it illustrates a point, and it&#x27;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&#x27;t help to mentally contrast this with what people call &quot;web apps&quot; these days that use extremely complicated client-side code to communicate far less interesting things, and often do it badly anyway.

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.<p>Edit: this episode! <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250</a><p>Edit2: nope, this one (guess he liked this trick lol) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325</a> Pluto is only 100 meters away, but Alpha Centauri is 700 km away!

&quot;were&quot;.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Subjunctive_mood</a>

Here is another pretty cool solar system scale model: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sweden_Solar_System</a><p>Some photos here: <a href="http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-solar-system-spans-the-length-of-sweden" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;io9.com&#x2F;5882220&#x2F;worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-sol...</a>

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

Nit: kM -&gt; km; meters are abbreviated &#x27;m&#x27;, usually.

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&#x27;t have to stop the flight to read it.

Pluto but not Ceres? That&#x27;s just discrimination based on historical inequity!

Anybody else get the feeling that we&#x27;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&#x27;ll eventually be as easy and commonplace as we see in sci-fi, but I&#x27;m having a moment of doubt we&#x27;ll ever get there, or if there&#x27;s any point out-living the home planet.

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.<p>Even without the horrible &quot;zoom in&quot;, the size loses meaning and I can&#x27;t tell how big it is, because humans think in logarithmic scales. I can&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t be appreciated by glancing at the number of zeros.<p>Given me logarithmic scales for comparing and estimating sizes any day.

If the moon WERE only 1 pixel...you know...because it&#x27;s not. :)

Really neat. I enjoyed scrolling to earth. After that it became painful.<p>Thankfully, the solution was easy:<p>Open Chrome Inspector Console:<p>$(&#x27;.essay&#x27;).css({ left: &#x27;20px&#x27;, marginBottom: &#x27;15px&#x27;, maxWidth: &#x27;600px&#x27;, position: &#x27;relative&#x27; });<p>$(&#x27;#bigspace&#x27;).css(&#x27;left&#x27;,&#x27;inherit&#x27;);

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.

&quot;.. 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&quot;<p>Abstraction is where our imagination lights up, where we make art and fall in love and build things. These empty spaces, it&#x27;s where we find that these brains that evolved to escape Jaguars and find food, are actually pretty amazing in themselves.

Some predecessors, just out of interest:<p><a href="http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.phrenopolis.com&#x2F;perspective&#x2F;solarsystem&#x2F;</a> This page has been kicking around for ages, not sure how long though.<p><a href="http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com&#x2F;</a> More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)

Nicely done! I&#x27;ve always wanted to build something like this, and have never gotten around to it. I can&#x27;t imagine it would have ended up as good as this.

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.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8</a>

This is very cool - I love demonstrations like this that show the scale of incomprehensible scales. It&#x27;s always fascinating.

I made it about halfway past Saturn before I gave up scrolling. Nice work.<p>One comment: If you&#x27;re using km for the distance units, you might as well stick with it (metric) for all the other examples like 75 mi&#x2F;hr and 475 ft to be more consistent. Better yet, an option to switch the units between imperial and metric would be pretty cool.

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.<p>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.

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

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

My friend pointed out:<p>&quot;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&quot;

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&#x27;s one of several annoyances that are making me think of going back to IE.

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

Well, you could go outside and do it with marbles and soccer balls:<p><a href="http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar-system-really" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;florin.myip.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...</a>

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.

I can&#x27;t help it. Everything like this reminds me of Powers of Ten [1].<p>1 - <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0</a>

Don&#x27;t know if I should be embarrassed or proud that I manually scrolled all the way past Uranus before giving up!<p>My favourite quote: &quot;... once nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist&quot;

It&#x27;s ironic to read «The brain isn&#x27;t built to handle &quot;empty.&quot;» remark having «How to meditate» (that aims to empty your mind&#x2F;thoughts) on HN front-page.

Another implementation (scroll down instead of to the right):<p><a href="http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com&#x2F;</a>

Too much time was spent on this last night, but here it is <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/yrFK4/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;yrFK4&#x2F;</a>

Back in the late 70&#x27;s, when I was in grade school, I used to make maps with just about the same scale with rolls of my dad&#x27;s thermal printer paper.

Place an orange on the floor, ten feet (3m) away place a cherry.<p>Earth and moon.<p>Walk away a thousand yards (1km) and place a 30ft (10m) high pumpkin.<p>That&#x27;s how big the sun is and how far it is from us.<p>* aprox scale

Should this not be &quot;If the moon were...&quot;?

Log scales are for quitters, relevant xckd: <a href="http://xkcd.com/1162/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1162&#x2F;</a>

Are you kidding me? Sideways scroll with no way to use my scroll wheel? It&#x27;s choppy and unreadable scrolling using the scrollbar, and using the right arrow is just too slow.

&quot;...or super-powers in a sic[sic]-fi series that you&#x27;re watching late at night...&quot;

This is major tom to ground control, &quot;Im floating in a most peculiar way.&quot;

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

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

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

I had to come read the comments to figure out why I was just seeing a black screen that wasn&#x27;t scrollable. Sideways scrolling? Really? There&#x27;s a reason no one uses it.

Good idea for toilet paper

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

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

I cheated :)

I feel like it&#x27;s not the vastness we can&#x27;t comprehend, it&#x27;s the relation between such &quot;tiny&quot; planets and such big distances that&#x27;s hard to grasp. You can&#x27;t zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can&#x27;t zoom in or else the map gets even larger.