We are very very very small
Ever wonder how large the Earth is or how big is the Solar System? Sometimes books and illustrations can give you a wrong idea about things. Very wrong in fact.
For instance, the distance between the planets is just so amazing in length that I could only explain it properly using an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything“:
Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.
And if the distance just doesn’t blow your mind, then look at just how small we are in diameter compared to the rest of our solar system. (via Sandwalk)
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