If the Earth were 100 pixels wide

http://www.distancetomars.com/

by oseibonsu • 13 years ago

996 208 13 years ago

distancetomars.com

33273• 13 years ago

if I leave it running will I get to mars? just out of curiosity? ( i do have better things to do ).

damon_c• 13 years ago

(spoilers ahead)

Yes.

shanelja• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's about 530,000 pixels away, kind of shows the grand scale of our solar system and that's just the parts have have a chance of reaching any time soon.

jerf• 13 years ago

Or you can turn off Javascript and hit the "End" key. Alas, there does not seem to be any real-life equivalent to that.

33273• 13 years ago

Scotty is yet to invent the warp teleportation theory...

austenallred• 13 years ago

This is the first time I've actually been able to comprehend the perspective of distances so big they don't mean much as a number. Thank you.

marcosdumay• 13 years ago

You can easily build an in 1:2e9 scale replica of the Solar System. You'll just need a 90cm sphere to use as the Sun, some 4-5 km of area do arrange things and a paquimeter for measuring the planets. At this scale, everything is just about as big/small as one can manipulate.

Bu you won't be able to place the Voyager in there. For that you'll need a car and a road trip.

sjwright• 13 years ago

The satellite or the Intrepid-class starship?

ajays• 13 years ago

Isn't there such a thing in downtown Ithaca?

gridmaths• 13 years ago

They did a nice job of this along the Melbourne waterfront boardwalk, here : http://lokenote.com/lokenote/OBWw7zwX

I think the scale is 1 to 1 billion

pics :] https://plus.google.com/photos/106795164119213709932/albums/...

mseebach• 13 years ago

I was looking for the one in SE England, which turned out to be the Otford model. It makes for a pleasant afternoon hike.

But in the process I came across this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

redblacktree2• 13 years ago

There are these models too, already installed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

duaneb• 13 years ago

I think I remember a Bill Nye the Scoence Guy episode about this.

ashwinaj• 13 years ago

Awesome. Thumbs up!!

rsingla• 13 years ago

I'd love to see one of these for the other planets in our solar system. Maybe even Pluto!

ldh• 13 years ago

Beautiful, I love it!

vadman3• 13 years ago

Not sure if it's a bug or a typo, but the "width" (diameter) of the Earth is 12,742 km, not 6,371 (which is the radius).

zyb09• 13 years ago

Shouldn't it be something more like 20,000 km, since the equator is about 40,000 km long and we're looking at half of it? Anyway 6,371 can't be right though.

vadman3• 13 years ago

No, that's circumference - 3.14 * 12742 is approx. 40K. You are looking at the Earth side-on, so you only see the 2D projection of the half-equator. (EDIT: I think it should be "1D projection")

Another nitpick - presumably our view axis is perpendicular to the solar system plane. The Earth would not look like in the picture, we would see one of the poles but slightly off-centered.

JDGM4• 13 years ago

You're right! How frustrating. The most frustrating is that I was just about to share this with some friends and know that I now risk either: 1.) Them smugly pointing that inaccuracy out and failing to enjoy how cool this is otherwise, or 2.) The website author correcting it by the time my friends see the link so any "btw there's a typo" comment I make being confusing. I'm going to share it anyway!

EDIT: I fear this may be worse than we had initially thought. The diameters of the Moon and Mars suffer the same problem and the pixel distances appear to be based on those wrong numbers so actually all the "apparent" distances are twice as long as they should be. (My working was to check that the Earth was indeed 100 pixels on my screen, calculate that 1 pixel = 127.42km, multiply that by the claimed "6033 pixels" to the moon to get 768724.86 which is twice as large as it should be...)

vadman3• 13 years ago

So it's a bug after all :/ hope the author fixes it, such a neat idea otherwise.

itafroma• 13 years ago

I tweeted the error to the creator (David Paliwoda) and it's now been corrected.

klenwell• 13 years ago

On the way to Mars, there was a flash and the screen went white. I guess I didn't make it.

fusiongyro5• 13 years ago

What's frustrating is how much better of a candidate Venus would be, if it weren't for its atmosphere. It's closer than Mars and larger too.

izend• 13 years ago

I like to imagine if Mars and Venus were swapped would Venus then be habitable?

afreak3• 13 years ago

No. Simply put: the core is likely solidified just like Mars and its magnetic field is very weak, causing the weather to be influenced by only its rotation and solar winds. It would be far more difficult to terraform than Mars really.

Also a Venusian day is something like 5,800 hours and its surface temperature is capable of melting lead.

keiferski• 13 years ago

Theoretically, we could build floating cities on Venus:

Landis has proposed aerostat habitats followed by floating cities, based on the concept that breathable air (21:79 Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture) is a lifting gas in the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, with over 60% of the lifting power that helium has on Earth. In effect, a balloon full of human-breathable air would sustain itself and extra weight (such as a colony) in midair. At an altitude of 50 km above Venusian surface, the environment is the most Earth-like in the solar system – a pressure of approximately 1 bar and temperatures in the 0°C–50°C range.

Because there is not a significant pressure difference between the inside and the outside of the breathable-air balloon, any rips or tears would cause gases to diffuse at normal atmospheric mixing rates rather than an explosive decompression, giving time to repair any such damages. In addition, humans would not require pressurized suits when outside, merely air to breathe, protection from the acidic rain and on some occasions low level protection against heat. Alternatively, two-part domes could contain a lifting gas like hydrogen or helium (extractable from the atmosphere) to allow a higher mass density.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_city_(science_fiction)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus#Aerostat_...

redblacktree2• 13 years ago

Really cool. Thanks.

I also find it awesome that this man's name is Landis. Only two characters away from Lando (Calrissian), who also lived in a floating city.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

Kind of a silly thing to say though. If Mars had a "better" atmosphere too it'd be that much more superior as a colonization target.

fusiongyro5• 13 years ago

It's an idle wish.

VLM2• 13 years ago

Nicely done. A biology scaled version would be cool. Like if a virus was 100 pixels wide...

petercooper• 13 years ago

Or.. an electron is 100 pixels wide..

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

Better use a proton instead.

Electrons are point-like particles, ignoring their wave characteristics, so don't have a "size" per se.

bithive123• 13 years ago

http://htwins.net/scale2/

leeoniya• 13 years ago

related: interactive scale of the universe http://htwins.net/scale2/

jdechko• 13 years ago

The whole time I was browsing that (incredible) site, all I could think of was the intro to The Big Bang Theory.

ErrantX• 13 years ago

Oh this is fantastic! My father teaches astronomy to kids (he has a mobile planetarium that he takes around schools [1]) and one of the main pain points he has mentioned is communicating a sense of scale to them.

This is elegant because it mixes the concept of "imagine this orange is the earth, mars would be in <nearby town>" within the constraints of a web page.

Kids have difficulty visualising distances in an abstract way - but time is much simpler. And the length of the scroll to Mars really emphasises this.

Great visualisation.

1. http://www.starlincs.co.uk

jacquesm• 13 years ago

That is super cool! Can you please ask him to put some larger images on there because I only get these tiny little thumbs.

brownbat• 13 years ago

I'd really like to see a few more markers:

1) 3100 px: Farthest humans have been from Earth (Apollo 13, April '70: 400,171 km)

2) 10 px: Gemini 11, farthest from Earth on non-lunar mission (Sept '66: 1,374.1 km)

3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Far...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

Taking Earth's diameter as 12,742 km (though it bulges by about 43 km in the center), we're saying that's 100 px. So if my basic algebra is right (no promises) you can convert the above km values to px by dividing by 127.42.

sho_hn• 13 years ago

I think the value of this is in its focus and simplicity. There have been other websites using zooms and/or scrolling to visualize scale differences (e.g. http://scaleofuniverse.com/), but this is an elegant statement about just one fact, and I think that's more likely to get the ball rolling in someone's brain and amaze them than inundating them with trivia all at once (but thanks for the trivia just the same :).

X-Istence• 13 years ago

Every time I see that page it makes me realise just how small and insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, and how badly I really want to go exploring everything that is out there.

thangalin• 13 years ago

I made a 3D render of a flyby. I should have added markers from the space programs into the video. The video shows how long it would take to reach all the planets, if you flew at a constant velocity (about 10x light speed).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ

bebop• 13 years ago

well done!

jobigoud• 13 years ago

"3) 3 px: Apogee of ISS (farthest a human has traveled for... a while: 424 km) (I'm probably forgetting something, can't find a good list of spaceflights by distance...)"

You're forgetting STS-125, the last Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission, March 2009, Apogee 578 Km.

xefer2• 13 years ago

Several years ago J. Richard Gott and Mario Jurić of Princeton put together an awesome logarithmic map of the entire universe:

http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/

fabriceleal2• 13 years ago

I would like to see Voyager 1 (about 1.847×10^10 km, accordingly to wikipedia [1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1

[EDIT] 1000 to 10^10 :P

fabriceleal2• 13 years ago

Thats about 144953696 px if my calculations aren't failing.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

Brilliant. I never actually reached mars - just the gut wrenching distance to the moon made me realise how amazing the Apollo program was - whatever gets us to Mars ...

mark-r2• 13 years ago

I'd love to see the Sun included on the opposite side of the scale. Its diameter is 109 times that of earth, making it 10900 pixels. Would be just as impressive a demonstration.

devgutt3• 13 years ago

I didn't go through much, but I'm quite sure that in that scale, It would be a flat line

mark-r2• 13 years ago

I tried simulating it, and it's just enough curvature to get the point across. Assuming I didn't have a bug of course.

MacG13r• 13 years ago

Very Cool!!

shardling10• 13 years ago

It bothers me a little that they show the motion against a starfield like that -- the stars are so far away that they won't shift perceptibly even on a journey to mars.

I mean, I don't have any better ideas, but given that the whole point is to give an idea of scale I wish they'd come up with something else. :)

guy22214• 13 years ago

You're talking about a first-person view, aren't you? But we don't start with that, we start with a third-person view of Earth and then "pan" across the sky...

So wouldn't panning across the sky from whatever vantage point actually produce that movement? Same as when you point a telescope and pan, the stars move against your view...?

shardling10• 13 years ago

Hmm, I see what you're saying, but that's not what the demo is trying to convey. At one point it says "You're now traveling at [1/5 the speed of light]" -- that would be nonsense if it was conceived as a panning motion.

e: Ah, but as someone else points out, the trip must actually exceed the speed of light, so the whole thing is nonsense. The author should recast things the way you describe them, and thus solve multiple problems at once.

finnh• 13 years ago

You're right, we do start with a 3rd person view of Earth .. but I still interpreted the motion as translation rather than rotation.

By your interpretation, the camera lens is at a fixed point and then simply "swings" from pointing at Earth to point at Mars. But, from such a supposed point, both the Earth and Mars would be fixed points rather than objects with "multi-pixel" width.

So the fact that both the Earth & Mars are viewable as non-point objects implies translation rather than rotation... and so GP's gripe stands =)

[edit: oh, and what shardling says too]

millerm3• 13 years ago

How about you just imagine the ship is rotating on an axis for artificial gravity generation. Then, if you were looking out the window, you would see the starfield whizzing by. :-)

Edited for smiley.

vacri4• 13 years ago

Interesting idea - all the scifi I've ever seen has had ships rotating around the axis of travel, but never orthogonal to it.

marshray3• 13 years ago

Sure, but then I have no sense at all of the distance traveled.

vacri4• 13 years ago

Does it bother you that Florida and the Mediterranean have gone missing? :)

shardling10• 13 years ago

What do I look like, a geographer? :P

But yes, while the project looks superficially nice, it seems to be riddled with small errors. Hopefully the author incorporates some of the feedback!

Jeremy1026• 13 years ago

A little bit about the Mediterranean. But not at all to Florida, I think we all would be better off without Florida. (The geniuses that inhabit that peninsula need to go with it.)

cyanoacry• 13 years ago

I think the best thing to do would be to provide periodic asteroids or rocks that go across the screen every now and then---it's very difficult to get a sense of speed with a repeating star field, not even including the fact that this wouldn't happen in the first place.

Since the starfield was periodic, it looked to me as if it were staying still or moving backwards at times (the wagon-wheel effect[1]) :(

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect

xdenser• 13 years ago

it says it is traveling at 1/10 th of light speed. it takes less than minute to get to Mars in pixels, but from other sources I know it takes 13 minutes for radio signal to get to mars. Something does not play here.

shardling10• 13 years ago

This is at the closest pass, when Mars is ~0.5 AU away from the earth; that's 4 light minutes.

It takes 13 minutes from light to get to Mars from the sun, and I think that'll also work out to be close to the "average" time from Earth to Mars.

In any case, you're right that apparently the demo exceeds the speed of light at some point, because it doesn't last for 4 minutes. Someone else suggests that the motion be interpreted as a fast pan rather than a physical motion, which is how this should have been implemented to not contradict the laws of physics. :)

crapshoot101• 13 years ago

very cool - thank you.

joeycastillo• 13 years ago

One thing that's always gotten to me about this distance is what it means for communication latency. Mars is 20 light-minutes away. If we sent colonists, communication would be a 40-minute round trip. No phone calls home, no way to have a chat with friends or loved ones; at best they could send a message, and wait 40 minutes for a reply. That's far away.

anonymfus• 13 years ago

Like foreign country few hundreds revolutions of our planet around the Sun ago.

Connaissance• 13 years ago

Good point. We have so forgotten how bad it used to be, that 40 mins seems so long. Kings weren't able to talk to their ambassadors in 30 mins, not that very long ago.

MrBra4• 13 years ago

if we could stretch a stick as long as the distance from earth to mars and use it to tap on mars ground something like a morse code to communicate, would that message be faster than a wifi message traveling at the speed of light?

danielweber2• 13 years ago

Does everyone come up with this idea independently, or is someone suggesting it? It's a very common retort to speed-of-light communications, but someone told me about it before I thought of it.

Anyway, your idea wouldn't work. If you press on one end of the stick, it would issue a pressure wave along the length of the stick near the speed of light (depending on its material), so you haven't gained anything.

marshray3• 13 years ago

No. As in air, the speed of sound in stick is still slower than the speed of light.

rikacomet• 13 years ago

please also mark the Lagrange Points http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

plus Sun, that would be really cool!!

DanBC• 13 years ago

The few pixels to the low Earth orbit and ISS is gently depressing. When's the last time a human went further than that? 1972?

S4M• 13 years ago

It's nice but his scale is wrong. He states that the Earth is 6371 km large, while in reality, it's twice that, as 6371 km is just the radius of the Earth, and what you really see is its diameter.

JDGM4• 13 years ago

Indeed, and it appears that 63.71km per pixel has then been used to calculate the pixel distances to the Moon and to Mars so in fact they are twice as many pixels long as they should be.

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

Here is a photo of the Earth and Moon, with the to-scale distance between them. It makes a great desktop background:

http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/

tankbot2• 13 years ago

This is really cool, though I would like to see a version in higher resolution with some stars. Not oppressively bright stars, just a hint to remind you that there are billions of billions of violent, fiery balls of self-contained exploding gas out there...

drewolbrich• 13 years ago

If it was a real photograph, I do not think you would see any stars in the frame. The Earth is extremely bright compared to the stars. If the exposure of the film/video (or your eyes) was set to portray the Earth at that brightness, you wouldn't see any stars.

Example: http://www.astrobio.net/images/galleryimages_images/Gallery_... This is a real image and is not CG.

Another one: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/images/ISD/highres/AS17/AS17-1...

millerm3• 13 years ago

That's actually a pretty cool photo. I was staring at it, as my new background, and was thinking how amazing it is that their mutual gravitational influence is actually enough to keep the moon in its orbit. I guess I mean it's hard to tell just how massive yet, in contrast, how small something like the earth and moon are. That or it's the half bottle of beer I've had.

arc_of_descent• 13 years ago

Set it as my desktop background. Made me realize how dirty my monitor screen was. :)

codeulike• 13 years ago

This simple graphic of the Earth and Moon and the distance between them, to scale, is also pretty thought provoking

http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/index.html

edit: just large image: http://www.traipse.com/earth_and_moon/earth_and_moon_1280.jp...

undershirt2• 13 years ago

You can draw a circle in the palm of your hand, then a smaller circle on the other. Spread your arms out to your side, and that's about the distance from the earth to the moon.

I would get that tattooed if I was into that kind of thing.

calebegg• 13 years ago

This would depend heavily on the size of the circles.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

Very rarely have I seen a single idea so perfectly illustrated. Impeccable timing and presentation. Unexpected, every step of the way. Kudos.

larrydavid• 13 years ago

Yes this was really well executed. Kind of a shame to see a lot of the top comments dominated by the picking at any inaccuracy they can find (not surprising, it seems a trademark of HN these days). Ok it isn't a perfect scientific simulation but rather a rough visual guide to grasp the scale of space travel, and I think it achieves that well.

stouset• 13 years ago

That's the thing: people are arguing that, as astonishing as the portayal seems, it still manages to give people a gross underestimation of how big these scales really are.

As portrayed, it seems like it only takes a minute or so to get to Mars at 20% of the speed of light. But really, they continue speeding up the starfield to multiples of superluminal speeds. As great as that distance seems, it's even more than an order of magnitude larger than depicted.

ohazi• 13 years ago

Is anyone else a little bothered by the fact that the reported speed was 1/5 the speed of light, yet the flyby necessarily increased to well over the speed of light in order to actually get you to Mars before you got bored and closed the tab? Traveling at the speed of light would have taken 5-20 minutes. Traveling slower than that would have taken even longer...

chm• 13 years ago

Distances are in pixels, with the Earth's diameter being 100 px.

aetherson2• 13 years ago

Yes, he knows. But the point is: They say they're going 20% of the speed of light (in pixels). But the closest approach of Earth and Mars is about 4.35 light minutes away from each other. So if our virtual speed is 20% of the speed of light, it follows that the page should take more than 20 minutes to reach Mars. And it doesn't.

It doesn't even take 4.35 minutes, so the page must be continuing to accelerate past the 20% c measure, to superluminal speeds, in order to finish in a couple of minutes or so.

Which they don't mention.

aqme28• 13 years ago

Travelling at the speed of light would have taken 0 seconds for you, the traveller, but 5-20 minutes for your observer.

However, the Lorentz factor at 20% of the speed of light is ~1.02. This means the distance you travel is only about 2% shorter, so relativistic effects aren't the reason for the discrepancy.

shardling10• 13 years ago

Plus, if it was large enough to have an effect on perceived time, it would affect the apparent distance as well, thus negating the point of the demo!

aetherson2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I hadn't realized that they were doing that, and it does bother me. I don't mind the idea that we're going FTL, but they should explain that in the text, not just report 20% of the speed of light. Ironically, it makes the distances seem shorter than they are, in a thing that seems designed to make you understand how long they are.

doktrin• 13 years ago

I also wish they would have noted the acceleration. Not doing so in fact undermines the point they're probably trying to make (giving users a visceral feel for the distances involved). Can't say it bothered me, though.

JDGM4• 13 years ago

What is bothering me most now is that if Earth is 100 pixels wide then 1 pixel is 127.42km and Mars should be something like 54600000/127.42 = ~428500 pixels away, not the claimed 857000. The radius of planets has been used where it should be diameter and this error seems to have been carried forward throughout the demonstration.

EDIT: This has now been corrected - nice one!

primitur2• 13 years ago

I'm more bothered by the authoritative fact that 'the timeline for a manned mission to Mars is the 2030s'. Says who, NASA?

They're not the only ones trying to get there.

jarek2• 13 years ago

Does anyone else have a realistic more aggressive timeline?

Steuard• 13 years ago

Essentially all Mars missions under serious consideration rely on special alignments of planetary orbits to minimize the fuel required. That leads to very specific "launch windows" that may only occur every few years. For an Earth-Mars trip, the basic launch window is available roughly every two years, but there are particularly low-energy opportunities every 16 years or so.

My understanding is that the next of those will be the 2018/2020 launch windows, which is almost certainly too soon for a mission to be ready. So the following low-energy opportunities will be somewhere in the mid 2030's. That's not to say that it would be impossible to use a launch window in the mid-2020's despite the higher fuel cost (or even some other orbit entirely that didn't try to minimize fuel at all), but doing so would be substantially more difficult.

Here's a link that is useful primarily because it links to more thorough discussions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars#Launch_wind...

Jabbles• 13 years ago

For me it currently says "You're currently travelling at 7,000 pixels a second 200,000 km/h" - which is clearly wrong, as at that speed it would take an hour to get to the moon.

Good idea, well intentioned. But they got the numbers wrong...

ubershmekel• 13 years ago

100 pixel earth = 13KM

1 pixel = 0.13KM

7K pixels/s = 910 KM/s

910 * 60 * 60 = 3.3 Million KM/h

afterburner2• 13 years ago

Speed of light: 1.07925285 × 10e9 km/h Reported speed: 200,000 km/h

So more like 1/5000 the speed of light. But as pointed out below the reported speed may be way off.

I wonder if a mistake about the speed of light was made; it's about 300,000 km per second.

drostie• 13 years ago

Right, but the original comment is also quite right that the speed is being misreported and the actual speed you're going (reported as 7000 pixels per second) is 3x the speed of light:

    (12742 km) / (100 px) * (7000 px)/s / c = 2.975

rkuester• 13 years ago

Cool site, but it's "If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, ..."

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i...

</pedantry>

acheron• 13 years ago

Thank you! I tweeted this link earlier and had originally copied the "was", then realized it sounded wrong and corrected it.

xefer2• 13 years ago

It's the only time we get to use a different word to express the subjunctive mood in English.

ckvamme• 13 years ago

Really cool. Anything that sheds light on how amazingly double awesome the Mars Rover Mission is makes me happy.

ikkyu• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this Bill Nye episode

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8

broabprobe• 13 years ago

Says we wont get to Mars until the 2030s, I think the Mars One project and others would beg to differ...

biot2• 13 years ago

Using this site, I was able to make the Kessel run in less than 1200 pixels.

b_emery• 13 years ago

If the Earth radius was 100 pixels, the average depth of the ocean (~4km) would be less than 0.1 pixels. I once had a professor hold up piece of paper and say "this is my scale model of the pacific ocean". Took me a while to realize he wasn't joking.

JDGM4• 13 years ago

The one my teacher used was the billiard ball, and told us "if the Earth were the same size as this, it would be smoother". A quick google suggests that is indeed true, but it would not be rounder. (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/09/08/te...)

Gravityloss2• 13 years ago

The starfield should not move anyway, because of parallax. The stars are really far away and the sky looks the same on Mars and Earth.

DavePaliwoda• 13 years ago

Hey guys, Dave here, made the site.. Really amazed by how much coverage this thing has got, and really surprised by how poor my maths were. Not surprising given I failed both maths and physics at college. Really happy to be inspiring debate, I've gone over my sums and given it another shot

Thanks!

stcredzero6• 13 years ago

"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"

This makes it immediately obvious you haven't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understand how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.

http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

Should have switched to warp 1.

solox3• 13 years ago

Perhaps this is relevant: Opera's rendering glitches mean that we cannot go to Mars with the latest version of Opera on Windows.

T-hawk• 13 years ago

Mostly worked for me in Opera 12.14 on WinXP. The first click showed white space instead of stars, but then the second click (after the moon) showed the scrolling starfield the whole way.

devgutt3• 13 years ago

Why not?

  (function () {
    var d=1;
    setInterval(function () {
       $('#Earth-Illustration').css({'webkit-transform':
       'rotate(' + ((d>36) ? d=2 : d++)*10 + 'deg)'})},100);
  }());

Please, consider Africa as Asia ;)

eevee• 13 years ago

Perhaps you meant `transform`, which will actually work in WebKit browsers (you forgot the leading `-`) and also be translated by jQuery to other browsers' prefixed property names.

devgutt3• 13 years ago

tested in Chrome only...and only "transform" didn't work, I had to add "webkit-" to work...to make simple, I prefered not put the moz line

stcredzero6• 13 years ago

"At the current state of space technology, it will take at least 240 days to get to Mars"

Uh, no. The person who put this together obviously hasn't read a lot about proposed plans for Mars missions or even understands how transfer orbits work. 150 days is a likely practical limit for today's technology, but it's not a hard limit. Spend a little more fuel, and you could make it 149 days.

http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...

danielweber2• 13 years ago

You can keep on shortening the trip by another day, but it requires more energy each day you take off.

At a certain point (somewhere around 5-6 months) it makes more sense to use that energy to give yourself a bigger ship than to take another day off.

(I'm glad to see no one saying any more that the VASIMR could do it in 39 days. That was an annoying distraction.)

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

I like this. Good job, very creative!

Unoeufisenough• 13 years ago

Mars is pretty far, but 240 days doesn't sound so bad. In the age of explorers, the first human sailors to circumnavigate the earth took 4 years to do it. A handful of them even survived the journey!

KerrickStaley2• 13 years ago

Mars is a desolate, inhospitable rock floating in an immense void. I can't understand why people are captivated by the idea of living there.

bdunbar• 13 years ago

I'm semi-captivated by the idea. I'm not spending my (ha) fortune on it, but if the opportunity presented itself, I'd go.

You know how, for millennia, people have been drawn over the hill, to see new sites, live in places no one else has?

That's why.

stcredzero6• 13 years ago

It has water, mineral resources, a CO2 atmosphere plentiful enough to consider using it as an industrial feedstock, soil that we know you can grow plants in, a 24 hour day/night cycle, and enough sunlight to support crops. It also is "closer" to the rest of the solar system in terms of delta-v. If civilization expands into the solar system, Mars will be analogous to North America in the 16-20th centuries.

Mvandenbergh2• 13 years ago

>It has water, mineral resources, a CO2 atmosphere plentiful enough to consider using it as an industrial feedstock, soil that we know you can grow plants in, a 24 hour day/night cycle, and enough sunlight to support crops.

Mars' atmosphere has only 20 times more CO2 than Earth's does, CO2 is not a rare chemical. We don't know enough about Martian soils to be sure that we can grow crops there.

>Mars will be analogous to North America in the 16-20th centuries.

I see this analogy around a lot and I've never cared for it.

1) All successful settlements of Europeans in the new world had some economic purpose for existing. The first few attempts to settle North America by English settlers were dismal failures until they discovered that they could grow valuable tobacco there. What is Mars' tobacco? We'd need a product that is cheaper to manufacture on Mars and ship back to Earth than to make on Earth. We need this because...

2) Mars is a vastly more hostile environment than the new world. It would have been possible to set up fairly small colonisation groups that were mostly if not entirely self-sufficient and thus didn't need to find economically sustainable products to sell to the home country in trade for vital supplies. In fact, later settlement in New England followed this pattern - many people paid for their passage and bought some land and only needed a few imported goods rather than the whole-sale re-supply that the earlier settlers in Virginia had required.

The minimum local knowledge and technology base was essentially simple agriculture at first, followed by some village-level craftsmen for simple tools and such. This meant that only a small fraction of the local economy had to produce goods for export because most things could be produced locally.

That is very far from being the case on Mars. The minimum technology base required to have a mostly independent colony on Mars is a substantial fraction of our entire tech base on earth. Even if we assume that high-complexity, high value-density things like computers and other electronics are imported from Earth that still leaves us with a lot that needs to be made on Mars. If we want to build another settlement on Mars from our initial base, can we do that?

Can we build the environmental management equipment needed? Pressure envelopes, power generation and distribution? Even something like light bulbs would be hard to do. Individually, all of these things are totally possible of but when you add them all together you start to require an awful lot of machinery to take with you.

The alternative of course is to keep supplying these things from Earth but without a sustainable source of goods to export back to Earth that isn't going to be sustainable.

3) The relative cost of transportation. Early settlers of the new world could use existing ships once they knew where to go. With Mars we know where to go but we don't have the ships. A moderately wealthy merchant could pay for the passage of his whole extended family to the Americas, even if the price drops dramatically that isn't going to be the case with a passage to Mars.

None of this is to say that I don't want to see permanent human settlement on other planets, but I think that comparing it to the settlement of the Americas is very unhelpful.

CmdrKrool• 13 years ago

Cool.

Unfortunately though, on my regular setup of Firefox on Windows, the background image abruptly 'runs out' shortly after the "You're currently travelling at 70000 pixels/second" message appears, leaving me with a blank white screen. I believe this is due to this browser bug I've just found out about: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=816917

Fine on Chrome though.

acqq• 13 years ago

So one more site that works only in Chrome. Sad.

vjk2005• 13 years ago

Though not as cool as this, I used a similar scrolling idea back in 2011 to visualize a star that was one million times the mass of our sun — http://vjk2005.tumblr.com/post/4497783697/a-star-half-a-mill...

pjungwir2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the scale model of the solar system strewn around the Boston metro area. If you live there, it's pretty fun to visit all the planets. One year the MIT Mystery Hunt had a puzzle related to it.

igorgue• 13 years ago

Mars is fucking far.

stuntgoat• 13 years ago

I'd really like to see something like this for the anatomy of a cell! Nice work!

mprinz• 13 years ago

Great stuff! Would be great to see some other planets or facts in there.

brass9• 13 years ago

Amazing! Despite the factual inaccuracies, it's a wonderful job! Two thumbs up!

ygra• 13 years ago

A little strange handling of the class attribute in source. I'm fairly sure it also requires an = after it.

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

If the Earth were 100 pixels wide, then what we consider "space" is 1 pixel above its surface. One pixel...

maurits• 13 years ago

My favourite scale of the universe picture:

http://scaleofuniverse.com/universe-medium.jpg

chrislomax• 13 years ago

Never seen that image before, that is quite scary really. When people state that there is no such thing as aliens really annoys me when you see visualisations such as this.

yen223• 13 years ago

There's almost definitely aliens out there. The question is, will we ever get to meet them?

kyrias• 13 years ago

Some of the fonts look horrible in FF20/Linux x86-64..

rplst8• 13 years ago

I'm glad he didn't decide to do distancetobrunomars.com

chloraphil• 13 years ago

Did anyone else make the return trip and get disappointed there was no "welcome home"?

angrybeak• 13 years ago

And only 53 pixels wide? Is it even worth going there?

romeonova• 13 years ago

I was hoping to see something new on the way back from Mars. well done though!

tahoecoder• 13 years ago

You should speed up the rate a bit when going to mars, and just tell the user that the velocity is higher now. It takes up too much of our time, to be honest.

triplesec• 13 years ago

Bug Report: I'm afraid this crashed between the Moon and Mars, just as some "you are travelling" text came in on the LHS and then it just went to whitescreen. Firefox 19.0.2 on Win7-64Home. In case you can catch it. (yeah ok so my laptop's not Linux, sue me!)

bobiambob• 13 years ago

View in Safari on iPad, and change tabs while scrolling, then come back mid-scroll. Gotta love the iPad rendering.

mysteryleo• 13 years ago

I was thinking there'd be a scary monster that would pop out along the way

If the Earth were 100 pixels wide

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