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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused.. I always thought the big planets were a lot lot larger than earth

And... indeed they are. But the diameters of each of the other planets combined are less than the average distance between the Earth and the Moon:

Average distance from Earth to the Moon:

Approximately 384,400 kilometers.

Diameters of the other planets:

Mercury: 4,880 kilometers

Venus: 12,104 kilometers

Mars: 6,779 kilometers

Jupiter: 139,820 kilometers

Saturn: 116,460 kilometers

Uranus: 50,724 kilometers

Neptune: 49,244 kilometers

For a total of 380,011 km, so 4,000 km to spare!

Does this account for most measurements being from the center of earth to center of moon?

So needs both max surface levels subtracted.

Good point. The image doesn’t mention but the calculations do subtract radii of both Earth and the Moon.

Another way of saying it is that the moon is surprisingly far away and it was a real achievement to visit there.

Even more than mars or other planets, I think of the distance to the moon in terms of light-seconds. About 1.5 seconds away. (really 1.3)

I had known this fact for a while, but the ending of portal 2 really solidified it in my mind.

Ha! I've been fighting the urge to make a portal 2 comment. What a wonderful game

I miss it.

I think the smarmy British bot character (Wheatley) won some kind of award.

They really did a fantastic job with Wheatley. The comedy style isn't for everyone (my wife for example hates it) but for me it is incredibly enjoyable

I bet he was the inspiration for Claptrap, in Borderlands.

Check the picture in the post. I'm pretty sure it is to scale.

They are much larger, but the moon is much further away from Earth than you imagined.

The thing is that it doesn't look to scale to me. But that's probably because most other visualizations/models are not right. Especially in the distances. I checked some other images and while the planets seem to scale, my brain multiplies the size of the planets with the distance ratio.

"But steel is heavier than feathers."

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