An even better visualization of the size of the Solar System. It shows traveling from the Sun out to forever at the speed of light. Be prepared to spend hours watching the paint dry. I suspect traveling in space will be like war, long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AAU_btBN7s

[edit] arrgh. brain spaz forgot to put in the URL

I like planetary trails, where the orbits of the planets (or other celestrial objects) are proportionally reduced and placed in the landscape.

For example, this image from a park in Halle (Germany) shows the inner solar system: https://dubisthalle.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Planetenwe... -- but one has to walk 500 meters to reach Pluto.

The German Wikipedia has quite a long list of planetary trails: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenweg

I also like this solar system model from NASA, https://science.nasa.gov/learning-resources/how-big-is-the-s....

They compare it to a US football field.

"On this scale, the Sun, by far the largest thing in our solar system, is only a ball about two-thirds of an inch (17 millimeters) in diameter sitting on the goal line — that's about the width of a U.S. dime coin. ...

The inner planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are about the size of grains of sand on a football field scale. They would be dwarfed by a typical flea, which is about 3 millimeters long.

Closest to the goal line is Mercury, just under a yard from the end zone (.8 yards to be specific). ... At this scale, Mercury's diameter would be scarcely as large as the point of a needle.

Venus is next. It is 1.4 yards from the end zone. ...

On to Earth, sitting pretty on the 2-yard line. ...

Mars is on the three-yard line of our imaginary football field. ...

Jupiter remains pretty close to our end zone on the 10.5-yard line. ...

Saturn is on the field at 19 yards from the goal line. ...

Uranus ... is about 38 yards from our end zone.

Neptune is where things start to get way out. It is 60 yards from our solar goal line on the imaginary football field. ...

Tiny Pluto is much closer to the opposing team's end zone. It's about 79 yards out from the Sun ...

On this scale, our little friend Voyager 1 has left the game and is well out in the stadium parking lot or beyond."

Haha, cool, that gave me a chuckle :)

“We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent lifeforms everywhere and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.” - The Hitchhikers Guige to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Nice story.

But are you implying that we are somehow more evolved than the monkeys? Both the human and the monkey in the story have evolved for the same amount of time since our last common ancestor.

Without a magnetic field, isn’t the surface of Mars subject to sterilising radiation from Sol?

Belter, our future is in orbital habs. Going downwell is for tourism and archaeology.

It’s not worth doing because it is easier, but because all of our eggs are in one basket (planet). We know of disasters that can wipe out almost all life on a single planet. Of course, there are also disasters that can wipe out all life in one star system (and one region of the Galaxy). So, ideally we need to colonize many worlds in many different parts of the Galaxy, but baby steps. Step one is to have a sustainable population on multiple moons/planets/stations of this star system before we jump to other star systems.

I don't know. Have you seen humanity? I think teraforming another planet is probably easier than not fucking up this one

Vastly easier to not only stop but also undo all the damage here than to do anything of consequence on Mars.

The best way I heard this put: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.

Can you walk and chew gum?

Username checks out.

I can not confirm this; the parent calculation is the correct one. I can't immediately find what your error was. (edit: It's your [km/s]—you wrote [m/s] by mistake).

    (let* ((ρ ([g (cm -3)] 5))
           (d ([km] 22))
           (m (* ρ (expt d 3)))
           (v ([km (s -1)] 90))
           (ke (* 1/2 m (expt v 2)))
           (kg-tnt ([J (kg -1)] 4.2e6)))
      (values (/ ke kg-tnt)
       (as [megaton] (/ ke kg-tnt))))
    
    5.133857142857142e19 [KG]
    5.133857142857143e10 [MEGATON]

Based on the corrected 90 km/s instead of m/s it should be 52 pt (peta-ton) impact.

1040 x more energy that the Tsar Bomba.

Or 5-ish Tsar Bomba per country on Earth.

Or 3466 Hiroshima nukes.

Or 17 Hiroshima nukes per country.

90 m/s?

Way too slow, it's more like 70km/s (or 90) - seems you left out a k.

It is of the same caliber as the dinosaur ending meteorite. The planet barely shrugged from it. There is suspicion that something the size of pluto has already hit mars once upon a time. And it is way more massive than this speck of cosmic dust.

You could very well be right!

Good question, especially given the plane of our solar system is almost orthogonal to the greater plane of the Milky Way galaxy that contains us.

It is also a factor of where our surveys look on the sky. A lot of asteroid surveys have biases to look at the plane of our solar system (since this is where a lot of asteroids are).

It is probably random chance, however there may be some biases from where they come from on the sky (I know people who work on that, but I don't know much about it).

N=3 does not provide very robust statistics yet, give us another decade or two.

This orbit visualization uses a simple 2 body approximation, so only the sun. This is because unless an object has a VERY close approach to a planet the two body approximation is more then enough for this style of visualization.

I did a full proper n-body integration and it is not visually different than this.