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For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404 "This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective." The video is 45 minutes long and m…
If the start line of the marathon happens at the center of the Sun, and the finish line is at the center of the Earth...
You run for 213 yards to get out of the sun.
You make it to the surface of the Earth at 5 feet, 10 inches from the finish line.
(If the moon was eclipsing the sun, you would have run over it 122 yards from the finish line, and it would have a diameter of 3 feet, 2 inches.)
And Pluto's orbit? Well, it's 859 miles from the start line.
If the marathon had been in New York? It's kind of like running to Chicago. (It's a tad further than that.)
Oh, and on this scale, how fast is light travelling? 188 miles per hour. The world record human marathon speed was 13 miles per hour. So, 7% of the speed of light.
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404 "This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective." The video is 45 minutes long and m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to this page [0], which links to a broken link on NASA's site as source, it was "only" $720 million, not billions. I only mention it to underscore that our intuition on the cost of NASA is often wrong. You see a lot of people complaining about the relevance of spending on NASA, when they actually represent a very small part of the overall budget and they spend the money very well. In contrast, Facebook boug…
It's hard to agree on that, because I'm not a US citizen. Anyway what NASA / EU space programs are doing is far more significant for humanity ( IMHO ) than what Facebook Oculus and Snapchat are trying to achieve, so it looks really unfair.
They create demand, which means people work to purchase them.
That work brings value to society (person x helped build a bridge, y did a dental implant, z built a yacht (horrors, a toy for a rich person, but recursively read this post)).
This is how economics works. You can't artificially split out some random activity, decide it is 'frivolous', and tax it out of existence. We are creating things, not destroying things. Dollars spent do not disappear, they are leveraged and multiplied via the labor of millions as they pass through our hands in an elaborate dance of IOUs. A dollar bill is a chit - a promise of later labor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how accounting works. If it did, I'd personally be worth billions, too.
Pretty sure he/she's not talking about accounting.
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404 "This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective." The video is 45 minutes long and m…
Another way to understand the distances is the old scroll-through solar system. If the moon is one pixel, then Pluto is pretty far away. http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404 "This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective." The video is 45 minutes long and m…
I once designed a scale model of the solar system for an elementary school class. The sun was a ping-pong ball. At this scale, earth is about three meters from the sun, and Pluto is a hundred meters away. Both earth and pluto at this scale are too small to see with the naked eye.
If this is not astro picture of the year, I don't know what is: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/nh-...
It's a black and white photo of rocks and ice. It's interesting that it is Pluto, but photo of the year? Why?
Because exploration. I really get depressed reading comments like yours, and I don't mean to have a go at you, I understand where you're coming from. It just upsets me that you can look at the product of an over ten year mission and dismiss it with such casual disdain, as if this isn't something that is literally at the limits of what we as a species can do. This is what we were meant to do, what we are programmed to do since birth - explore.
The reason it depresses me is because an overwhelming majority think like you - liek wtf is roks innit who cares. And this is why we spend so much time and effort on inwardly focussed nonsense and no time at all, given what we could do, on exploration and actual achievement.
So yeah. It is just rocks and ice. You are right. By so observing, however, you have missed the point so completely that you have made me sad for the entire human species. Well done.
I made one of these my cover image on Facebook and called it The Ice Mountains of Pluto, which is a Golden Age Science Fiction story title if I ever heard one. But this isn't SF! It's a real photo! That was taken by an atomic powered robot! Amazing...
Steven Hawking is a nemesis of Robo, Carl Sagan helped our hero get to Mars with Voyager, and there is a talking Dr. Dinosaur who claims that he time traveled to our time using crystals.
I recommend starting at the beginning.
For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404 "This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective." The video is 45 minutes long and m…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg
EDIT: This one doesn't include Pluto.