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If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

joshworth.com

81–90 of 273 posts

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#81
post #3

Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.

> Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. Yes, agreed. I find it a little depressing. An unimaginably huge universe, tantalisingly there, but completely out of reach.

It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? I used to imagine a spaceship being alive, with people inside being analogous to "cells" in a multicellular organism.

Perhaps this is really how AI achieves consciousness?

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#82
post #3

Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.

We’re barely even using our first solar system, it’s way too early to be worried about reaching other stars.

Exactly, there is free fuel and aluminium just floating by, and we are unable to use them to upgrade our ships or refuel them.

Until we make full use of robotics and 3D printing, there is no point of heading far. And we have all the tools.

Distant stars will not be settled by a fast small ship travelling from earth. They will be settled by a city sized monolith produced by harvesting and smelting an entire small moon

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#83

I love how simple the HTML/CSS is. Absolute positioning with really large left: values. #saturn { position: absolute; left: 412397px; height: 34px; width: 65px; fill: #ffa043; }

Caused Brave in iOS to crash. I have a newer iPad mini with 12GB ram too. But luckily It didn't crash until I tried to close the tab.

This seems like a browser issue more than anything else. Yes it's "weird" to have millions of pixels horizontally on a page that is only a few thousand pixels tall, but it seems like an absolutely reasonable edge case that the browser should support.

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#84
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caused Brave in iOS to crash. I have a newer iPad mini with 12GB ram too. But luckily It didn't crash until I tried to close the tab.

This seems like a browser issue more than anything else. Yes it's "weird" to have millions of pixels horizontally on a page that is only a few thousand pixels tall, but it seems like an absolutely reasonable edge case that the browser should support.

“Why not save space by storing dimensions as uint16 internally?”

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#85
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. Yes, agreed. I find it a little depressing. An unimaginably huge universe, tantalisingly there, but completely out of reach.

It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? I used to imagine a spaceship being alive, with people inside being analogous to "cells" in a multicellular organism. Perhaps this is really how AI achieves consciousness?

[dead]

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#87
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not out of reach if you get very close to light speed. Time would advance very slowly for you, so counterintuitively it is possible to travel 5000ly in your life time. Although for everyone else at least 5000 years will pass, so better say goodbye to family and friend. Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing... Also light isn't slow. A photon instantly travels to the end of time and yet it still takes a few mi…

How would that feel as a traveler? Does all motion slow down to a crawl, all sub-atomic particles just "freeze" and essentially your thoughts and body aging too? So it would seem like you got there in an instant? For sure you're not just sitting there watching people get born, live and die in second and shrugging your shoulders.

You’d feel nothing out of the ordinary whatsoever. The starscape outside the ship would look strange though, shrinking into a small, blueshifted patch of sky straight ahead, while stars behind you would redshift out of the visible range. Everything moving at very low speeds relative to you would indeed appear to happen really fast.

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach. Yes, agreed. I find it a little depressing. An unimaginably huge universe, tantalisingly there, but completely out of reach.

Not out of reach if you get very close to light speed. Time would advance very slowly for you, so counterintuitively it is possible to travel 5000ly in your life time. Although for everyone else at least 5000 years will pass, so better say goodbye to family and friend. Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing... Also light isn't slow. A photon instantly travels to the end of time and yet it still takes a few mi…

Yeah if you have a body that can tolerate sudden jumps between reference frames you could pretty much explore the entire galaxy trivially, so long as you don't mind that few places will stay the same long enough to visit twice.

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#89
One thing to notice is how small Mercury is, only 1 pixel like the moons that show up. Here's a good photo size comparison. Mercury is smaller that two of the solar system's moon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary-mass_object#/media/F...

EDIT: And Pluto is smaller than all the moons almost anyone has heard of.

Re: If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

#90
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000 years of empty space to get to the next solar system. Exciting.

Not with light speed travel. At even 1% the speed of light, the travel time diminishes significantly: - Titan, Io and Ganymede are only 2.5 days away - Pluto is about 23 days Edit: Even at such speeds, we still can’t visit a nearby star system in a reasonable time-frame. Oh well.

Traveling at .1c within the solar system wouldn’t really be feasible due to the need to accelerate and decelerate. Not for meatbag ships anyway.
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