 |
By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
|
"Here’s a good one: I nicked it from the internet
Even if shrunk down by a factor of roughly 300 million, the universe would still seem incredibly vast to us.
The marble-sized Moon, nearest object to the golf-ball sized Earth would be located roughly 1.3 m (4 ft) away.
Assuming an average human walking pace of 2 m/s, we could comfortably traverse an equivalent of 800,000 km every second - roughly 2.66 times the speed of light.
However, if we wanted to get a look further inwards to the solar system, it would still take us roughly 3 minutes to reach the Sun - a sphere roughly 4.6 m (15 ft) in diameter, 500 m (1640 ft) away from Earth.
Turning around and heading outwards to the outer solar system, the journey would quickly become tiring - Mars could be found 750 m away, the main asteroid belt between 1.2 and 1.7 km away, a beach ball-sized Jupiter over 2.5 km away, Saturn 4.7 km away, Uranus 9.3 km away, and Neptune, along with the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, 15 km away.
If we wanted to reach the outermost minor planets such as Sedna, we would have to walk a full olympic marathon distance, while the Voyager 1, the most distant man-made object, would be over 70 km away.
Now, if we want to get anywhere interesting, we need to get into a car - raising our equivalent speed to roughly 30 m/s - 40 times the speed of light.
However, even if we aimed for the closest star system, Alpha Centauri, it would still take over a month of continuous driving to get there - as it would be more than 130,000 km away from the Sun (roughly 1/3 of the actual distance between the Earth and the Moon).
Milky Way itself would be still a colossal entity - 3.8 billion kilometers (3.5 light-hours) in diameter (bigger than the orbit of Saturn), while the Andromeda Galaxy would be located nearly 4 light-days away.
Finally, the entire observable universe would be roughly 300 light-years in diameter (still quite a lot)"
Love stuff like this |
