She pictures the center of it all
In recent news, Felix Baumgartner jumped from the edge of space. And the nearest star - Alpha Centauri, has at least one planet (no, it can't be habitable, it may be earth-sized but the orbit is more like Mercury than Earth).
Herewith some back-of-the excel calculations based on Neil deGrasse Tyson's observation that " the corresponding fall (of Felix Baumgartner) to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface"
If the earth was the size of a classroom globe...
Felix Baumgartner jumped from 1 millimetre up.
The international space station is 9.5 mm up.
Mars is a 1.6 kilometres away
Voyager 1, travelling for 35 years has reached the edge of the solar system and is about 420 kilometres away.
In the real universe, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years away.
= 4.06802721 × 10^13 km.
On the same scale of earth:globe it is / 42204724, more or less (Could someone get a more accurate number for the scaling down? And does it matter)
So scaled down, Alpha Centauri is 960 000 km away.
About twice as far away as the moon. Not the scaled-down moon that's smaller than an Earth globe, the real moon that's smaller than the earth. Picture a classroom globe, that you could hold in your hands. And then, twice as far away as the moon, another one. Time and space is big, and just seeing the mountains on the landscape is a major achievement. Clearly we need to send a probe. But we'll need a faster one
Herewith some back-of-the excel calculations based on Neil deGrasse Tyson's observation that " the corresponding fall (of Felix Baumgartner) to a schoolroom globe begins 1 millimeter above its surface"
If the earth was the size of a classroom globe...
Felix Baumgartner jumped from 1 millimetre up.
The international space station is 9.5 mm up.
Mars is a 1.6 kilometres away
Voyager 1, travelling for 35 years has reached the edge of the solar system and is about 420 kilometres away.
In the real universe, Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years away.
= 4.06802721 × 10^13 km.
On the same scale of earth:globe it is / 42204724, more or less (Could someone get a more accurate number for the scaling down? And does it matter)
So scaled down, Alpha Centauri is 960 000 km away.
About twice as far away as the moon. Not the scaled-down moon that's smaller than an Earth globe, the real moon that's smaller than the earth. Picture a classroom globe, that you could hold in your hands. And then, twice as far away as the moon, another one. Time and space is big, and just seeing the mountains on the landscape is a major achievement. Clearly we need to send a probe. But we'll need a faster one