Scale model of the solar system and FSD

Caramel Clown

Caramel Clown
I definitely had chills watching this. This video took quite an incredible amount of work. They did it just for fun, and in the name of science :D I can respect that.
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Robert Maynard
aws357 said:
Honestly. It will blow your mind.
Click to expand...

Mind. Blown.

Until the size of the sun and planets and the distances between the sun and the planets are expressed in terms of sizes and distances that are truly comprehensible, the scale of our Solar System is not truly apparent....
 

Miklos Atreides

Miklos Atreides
I remember a couple of years ago when I had a picture of M31 as a computer background at work.
A collegue saw it and said: "This picture exactly shows you your importance in the universe"
Somehow his remark has changed my mind to look at some things.

The Video can have the same effect.

Regards,
Miklos
 
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bootsam

bootsam
The scale between planets, stars etc is the main thing ive taken from ED. How, what is effectively a miniscule spark of energy, can exert enough gravity to pull other elementals into orbit around it. Tiny insignificant specks orbiting small points of light. It just shows how in reality, the universe we live in is made mostly of nothing much at all. Freaks your mind out and demonstrates to me that we, as a species or even as a planet, are so insignificant as to be pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Presuming there is a scheme of course, which I dont think there is. We just are. Because we can be.
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
bootsam said:
The scale between planets, stars etc is the main thing ive taken from ED. How, what is effectively a miniscule spark of energy, can exert enough gravity to pull other elementals into orbit around it. Tiny insignificant specks orbiting small points of light. It just shows how in reality, the universe we live in is made mostly of nothing much at all. Freaks your mind out and demonstrates to me that we, as a species or even as a planet, are so insignificant as to be pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Presuming there is a scheme of course, which I dont think there is. We just are. Because we can be.
Click to expand...

Remember that you are born dust and dust you will return - Amen
 

Zenith

Zenith
I think the comparison between the balloon sun and the real Sun nailed it for me near the end, showing that it was indeed all to scale.
 

Martin Schou

Martin Schou
Robert Maynard said:
Mind. Blown.

Until the size of the sun and planets and the distances between the sun and the planets are expressed in terms of sizes and distances that are truly comprehensible, the scale of our Solar System is not truly apparent....
Click to expand...

It will never become truly comprehensible. The numbers are quite simply too large to make sense to our puny minds.

We've developed to cope with sizes and distances that make sense to our natural environment as it's looked for millions of years. That's why our minds get somewhat confused when we see a huge mountain in the distance and it doesn't seem to move or become larger as we walk towards it.

Some things are simply truly incomprehensible, and there's nothing we can do about it.

For example - we know that the difference in strength between the Nuclear Strong Force and Gravity is 10^38:1 at the range at which NSF works, but it's still incomprehensibly large. You cannot set up any kind of perspective to make sense of that number.

Just to try though. Imagine that you've had a 100 Watt light bulb burning for the entirety of agrarian culture (about 10,000 years). The amount of energy that light bulb has consumed is ~1/10^38th of the energy the sun gives off in a single second.

That's just how astronomy works - the numbers are stupendously huge and far beyond any real comprehension.
 

aws357

A
Martin Schou said:
It will never become truly comprehensible. The numbers are quite simply too large to make sense to our puny minds.

We've developed to cope with sizes and distances that make sense to our natural environment as it's looked for millions of years. That's why our minds get somewhat confused when we see a huge mountain in the distance and it doesn't seem to move or become larger as we walk towards it.

Some things are simply truly incomprehensible, and there's nothing we can do about it.

For example - we know that the difference in strength between the Nuclear Strong Force and Gravity is 10^38:1 at the range at which NSF works, but it's still incomprehensibly large. You cannot set up any kind of perspective to make sense of that number.

Just to try though. Imagine that you've had a 100 Watt light bulb burning for the entirety of agrarian culture (about 10,000 years). The amount of energy that light bulb has consumed is ~1/10^38th of the energy the sun gives off in a single second.

That's just how astronomy works - the numbers are stupendously huge and far beyond any real comprehension.
Click to expand...

For once, I would be more confident in humanity (I'm usually pessimistic). For a long time, large distances would have made no sense to a medieval peasants. The distance from his fields to his house was large enough and he could not imagine the distance between say... his house and Jerusalem...

19th century briton were disoriented by the speed of trains at first, but they got used to it.
Now with a car, or trains, travelling from one place of a country to another is a formality. Travels from Europe to Asia are routine thanks to airplanes.

I still have some hope that one day humans will routinely take a cobra to commute and people will routinely fly from Asia to Europe (the planet) on holiday.

The biggest challenge is to keep our politics from blowing us to smithereens over who is right for frivolous reasons like religion and ideology.

I don't know enough physics to say if we will have portable suns to power our smartphones, but 30 years ago, a flat mobile phone with no buttons and 10 hours of autonomy was cyberpunk fiction... so, who knows :)
 
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Brimstone

Brimstone
I think I'll go crawl into my tiny little bed, in my tiny little room, in my tiny little house, in my tiny little town, in my tiny little country, on my tiny little planet, in my tiny little solar system, in my tiny little galaxy, and cry.
 

RMORTI

RMORTI
"not any bigger than that, you can put your thumb up and block the Earth!" 24 people...... 24! have left the embrace of Gaia out of everyone who has ever lived (as far as we know). It's the only place we know of where we can live as a species. And yet we are surely killing her and fighting wars on her and destroying the diversity of life that once thrived upon her. I often wonder about Reagan's speech concerning this subject. Was it sheer fantasy, a simple prayer for peace, or was it more? Whatever it was, our species continues to pollute and harm the Earth at a horrific rate. Creatures, which we depend upon for survival are dying off in entire species. The world has suffered multiple eradication events and eventually bounced back with new life. What species will evolve here after we have ruined everything and perished?
 
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