How Big is Space? | Hacker News Reader

How Big is Space?

bbc.com

220 pointsjonathansizz90 comments

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

Wanted to be the first :-)

What do you mean? Clearly our own personal reality is happening within 1 scrollbar-handle-height, and the whole of space is about 20 scrollbar-handle-heights, so space can't be that big...

It's Douglas Adams, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I hope you haven't read it because it's a treat.

On a log scale. 20 orders of magnitude is f*ing huge.

It's way bigger than the difference between having one penny in you account and having all the money in the world.

What about the difference between having one IPv6 address and having all IPv6 addresses?

Depends on definitions, but if you go with 10 as your base for "orders of magnitude" and 64-bit prefixes as "one IPv6 address" (which is the intended amount of address space for a single host), it's pretty close to precisely the same difference of scale. If you mean every possible 128-bit address of IPv6, then IPv6 wins by another 20 orders of magnitude.

EDIT: of course, space wins either way if you count volume rather than distance - the "orders of magnitude" compound additively. and I also doubt that "one scrollbar unit" corresponds exactly to a power of 10, so it's still a weird comparison.

yeah, the title was practically a setup for that :)

I mean, it's BBC, for cryin' out loud.

I'm worried that as these 'space is really big' sites get better, someone will inadvertantly create a browser-based total perspective vortex and instantly annihilate the brain of anyone who visits.

The median Silicon Valley techie ego surpassed 1000 millizaphods several years ago. Many of the Bay Area locals are already immune.

I thought the reason he survived wasn't that he just had a huge ego, but because that universe really was just created for him. Or maybe I'm misremembering that part?

You're right - by crawling out of the wrecked building through the window he entered a pocket reality designed to help him discover the true ruler of the universe. Or something.

I can't remember whether it happened that way in the radio series or the books as they're quite different (let's pretend the film never happened).

It was in the books because that's how I remember it and I never listened to the radio series (I also try to forget the film exists).

I thought the reason he survived wasn't that he just had a huge ego, but because that universe really was just created for him.

Apparently, it's just as good to think the universe is created just for you.

Um, wasn't that the whole point of the machine? It would strip away your self-deluding beliefs, and give you true perspective? In other words, no it isn't good enough to just think that the universe is created for you, the machine will kill you in that case. You actually need to have the universe created for you, and only in that case will you survive the experience.

I suspect many folks around here are pretty well immune to true perspective.

One thing that bothers me is that charts/apps like this have to use logarithmic scale due to obvious reasons, but log scale is just not very effective for most people to comprehend on an intuitive level.

In the last section each pixel is 1,000,000km, and the first section each pixel represents 1 meter, but experience wise it doesn't make the last section feel that much bigger, and I still have to keep looking at the numbers on the bottom to actually perceive the correct scale.

I can envision a kind of zooming out effect when you cross a scale boundary, which might have made this clearer and more intuitive.

The sine wave down the middle of the page helps with visualizing the changing scale. If you want a linear scale, maybe you will appreciate this page: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...

You killed it! :-)

I was looking for this exact link and Josh's site seems down(HN effect :))..

that page lets you appreciate the vast emptiness within which we live..

this link gives some extra details until the page is up http://gizmodo.com/this-scale-model-of-the-solar-system-will...

plus some great links in the comments.

It's worth to do a linear scale miniature of the solar system.

At the 1:10^9 scale, it fits well within a farm or a big park, all the planets are at a viable size, and the Sun is not too big.

That could make for a cool park. I imagine you'd have clear line of sight between the planets (either by having a clear path between or by raising them up on monuments), and telescopes setup at each planet in such a way that visitors could look at the other planets without people getting in the way.

The Sun would be 1.5 meters across, the Earth would be 1.2 centimeters across, and the whole thing would be 4.5 km from the Sun to Pluto.

It would be a very boring park.

Madison, WI has a cool version of this along a main bike path: http://www.spaceplace.wisc.edu/planettrek.htm

Not the scale you're looking for, but cool nonetheless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

EDIT: Wait! I think this is exactly the scale you're proposing: http://www.jeffreybennett.com/model-solar-systems/voyage-sca...

EDIT2: Well, actually 10^10, so another order of magnitude smaller than 10^9.

Yes the "Powers of Ten" and Josh Worth's site, both mentioned here in the comments, are both much much better than this.

One solution to help the user experience the scale would be if the spacecraft got continuously smaller pixelwise as the logarithmic scale gradually increased.

I feel like The Scale of the Universe did a better job at giving a sense of scale, and it goes all the way from plank length to the edge of the observable universe!

http://htwins.net/scale2/

I see this get posted a lot, and feel the need to share a similar thing Nikon did as well since the htwins one feels so woefully inadequate. Somewhat clunky interface, but far better for grasping the scale of things in relation to each other:

http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/

It was in Flash and I was too scared to click :-)

I agree, I find the BBC one pretty to look at but it's not a great illustration of how "big" space is.

An alltime classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (Powers of Ten (1977))

Thanks for that. Saw it in high school many moons ago, just watched the whole thing again.

It shows its age. The straight white man is literally at the center of the universe.

Somebody has to be.

You're right, it should have been Cthullu.

Space is like that one time you're in another country and you look out over the ocean, and there's a little boat there and then you realize it's actually a very large sailboat and for a moment you're struck by vertigo, wondering who the skipper is, wondering if they are out on vacation too or if this is their life, out here on the open ocean, with water like blue glass, and you have to take quick breaths and stare down at the beach rocks until it's passed, because for just a moment you feel like a tiny little part of the web of people moving upon the globe, and it makes your chest seize up because you know there is more out there than you will ever be able to see or know, there is so much that you will never be able to experience and understand, a thousand million things that you just can't fit into your life before you run out of life to live —

— but so much bigger than that.

I prefer the interactive solar system on Josh Worth's site.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...

Seconded, but it appears to be down now. The great thing about that one is it treats the Moon as one pixel and doesn't change scale.

And it has a cool light speed mode in the bottom right which really drives home the fact that even traveling at light speed isn't enough to get humans very far.

I'm surprised we didn't see any ads floating through space as we aimlessly scrolled down.

It's only the solar system, but it's still a long walk to Pluto: http://www.jeffreybennett.com/model-solar-systems/colorado-s...

Models like that get across the incredible amounts of space in space.

Cool. The largest solar system model is in Sweden[1], with Pluto being 300 km away from the Sun[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Globe

Definitely. There's one in Ithaca NY as well. They are pretty simple to do, I wish there were one in every town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk

Not sure why this goes with "Warp 1" when "Warp 1" is the speed of light, something that even a casual Trek fan may very well be unaware of, to say nothing of the general public.

I love this and show it to everyone I know. They've updated the graphics since I last saw it so I get to show everyone all over again.

Almost everybody is surprised when they learn how close to earth the ISS' orbit actually is. They look at me funny, well, some do, the barbarians, when I point out that it is in LOW-Earth Orbit after all and the pictures and video of Earth shot from the ISS vs. photos of Earth from the moon show that the station orbits very close to Earth indeed. Some people have no sense of awe and wonder... :/

Let us go on a journey of imagination across the vast distances of space...

...completely ruin it with scrolling...

...and stop at 20 light-minutes from Earth.

I liked the scrolling... it feels like they didn't scrolljack the browser either, it's very smooth.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/... have also done a good video on the scale of small and large, and putting the size of space into perspective, its pretty good.

Was anyone else surprised to learn that the US tested a nuclear explosion (Argus III) at a distance comparable to somewhere between the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope?

I was! Seems a bit irresponsible.

Son, lemme tell you about what we did in the 40s and 50s. You are in for some wild surprises. We took two halves of a supercritical core and held them separate with a screwdriver while wearing bluejeans and cowboy hats. Why? Because we could, dammit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

I had no idea there had been any nuclear explosions above the 100km line, let alone above ISS's orbit. How did I not know that?

Big is an understatement. If people had any real conceptualization of the degree of mineral wealth is out there in the inner solar system alone (to say nothing of the Jovian system), space programs would see a lot more public support.

On a related note, I hate stumbling across sci-fi novels on Amazon that conflate solar systems with galaxies. Same mindset at work there.

The Doctor Who writers would often use "constellation" when they probably meant "galaxy". Annoys me more than it really should.

They could have tossed in a few of the large moons of Jupiter & Saturn and included the Oort cloud at the very end for completeness.

Great visualization nevertheless...Especially loved the various markers for spacecraft. Mind boggling what we have achieved in the short space of about 60 years.

Reminds me on this on: http://www.distancetomars.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489039

If they're going to make a full page take-over-the-scroll type of experience, why wouldn't they do this from the bottom going up? I was distracted by the "upside-downness" of it the whole time.

Because you scroll from top to bottom, duh ;).

They could start the scrollbar at the bottom.

There's no up or down in space, I thought it was a neat reminder.

No Oort cloud? :(

No, not even the scattered disc got in. On the other hand - since the Oort cloud is up to 100,000 AUs[1] away from the sun - it would have added a bit of scrolling at the end of the page.

[1] 100,000 AUs: ~150,000,000,000,000 kilometres (big space is big)

"If there's one thing I like more than space... it's more space" - Frank Sidebottom

It would be nice if the values for the voyager and Pluto probes counted in realtime their distance instead of displaying a static number.

This was pretty cool! My kudos to those who put this together. BM for sharing.

Kinda depressing just how small we are and that we can't get around places to explore space without some groundbreaking invention that will transfer information from the atoms to another location instantly (something like spooky action except that after you are finished copying the atom data, the old copy must be deleted to prevent endless dopplegangers appearing) by appending some complex 3d position information (move all of my atom by appending some coordinates that could never be reached with even light travel). Something like http://hansonlab.tudelft.nl/teleportation/

> after you are finished copying the atom data, the old copy must be deleted to prevent endless dopp[el]gangers appearing

Why would we need to prevent this?

Play Sims 4 with the "Get to work" expansion. Having 8 me's in a house is a real problem.

Well when you want to comeback home , you don't want to come across a clone of yourself who already married your lover, had kids, settled down and your ex lover says "you were never around what did you expect and besides it's not like I'm cheating on you because it's a copy of you". I'd imagine time travels faster when you are out exploring deep space and having a blast while the copy of you is living his life on earth. Yeah, still worth it.

The Agent Smith problem. Right now if an entity in meatspace wants to copy itself it has to breed, and for anything complex the copies are not the same and have to go through a growing process. With copy teleportation it's not really any different than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V on your computer. As long as you have the energy you can build entire armies of yourself. There many be plenty of good scenarios for this to happen but I can think of far more downsides.

I just can't help but think that we'll reach a wall when it comes to exploring the real world. Even if we get to travel at the speed of light, we're still limited by it. In 20 years of light travel we'd only visit relatively close clusters. All the other stuff is thousands of light years away. Not to mention exploring other galaxies which are millions of light years away.

Quality of life in the virtual world will perhaps be better than that of the real world. In fact, this is my explanation for the fermi paradox. Most aliens out there have essentially "given up" the idea of exploring because everything is just too far away and they simply can't bend the rules of physics. So they're all living in the matrix.

With time-dilation, from the point of view of those on board, it's actually possible to travel as far as Andromeda with constant 1g acceleration (decelerating at 1g half way), within a few decades. Of course, time back on earth would have gone by a few million years...

Huh, but if light takes 2.5 million years to get to Andromeda, how does it take us a few decades? You're saying that from the point of view of the photon, it takes much less time?

Yes photons do not experience time, it's all the same instant for them

So a photon can get anywhere it wants instantly to them?

From the reference fram of the photon, yes

This is a great article (for laypeople, it's not supposed to be too technical) that explains it and makes it easy to understand: http://zidbits.com/2011/04/why-cant-anything-go-faster-than-...

I'll quote the relevant bit, "Imagine for a moment that you are a happy little photon created by a star in another galaxy some 4 billion light years away. From my perspective here on Earth, it took you exactly 4 billion years to travel from that star till you reached my retina. From your perspective, one instant you were created and then the next, you are are bouncing off or being absorbed by my eyeball. You experienced no passage of time. Your birth and death happened instantaneously.

This is because time slows for you as your get closer to light speed, and at it, it completely stops. This is also another reason why nothing can go faster than light. It would be like slowing down a car to a stop, and then trying to go slower than completely stopped."

It's super interesting that the speed of light is exactly 282,xyz (can't remember) miles per second. What're the chances? I'm just unable to comprehend the idea that a fundamental universal constant could be an exact whole number amount of an arbitrary measurement unit like that. You'd think there'd be a few decimal points or something.

You're misremembering. The speed of light in miles per second is ~186,282.396. The speed of light in meters per second is 299,792,458, but the meter is defined using the speed of light:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light

Not only this, but due to space compression to the photon the star and your eye are also exactly the same place!

Yes, that's how relativity works.

Plus, as in Egan's Diaspora, virtual entities can hibernate, or live at far lower clock frequency.

I've not read Diaspora (yet!), but this sounds more like Permutation City

I haven't read Permutation City yet, but virtualization in Diaspora is far more advanced. The default, as I recall, is ~800 times meatspace. I recommend reading Stephenson's Anathem first, however.

Edit: The Planck Dive is a follow-on.[0]

[0] http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Pla...

Fermi paradox is interesting because if aliens did have the ability to teleport they would've done so. The matrix does sound reasonable. What if we could have everything in this virtual world? The argument that we are in a matrix right now is moot because it kinda sucks. Great for the 1 percenters tho.

There are already plenty "solutions" for the Fermi paradox, one of those is the Multiverse hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse another one is the Holographic principle http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-growing-evidence-t...

what if . we invent a way to not reach out, but however reduce the space, that is how einstein will think.

> Kinda depressing just how small we are and that we can't get around places to explore space without some groundbreaking invention that will transfer information from the atoms to another location instantly

If that ever happens, you'd better hope that the Novikov self-consistency principle [0] holds, or be ready to deal with the inevitable causality violations.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_princ...

[1] http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instanta...

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