Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

joshworth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 273 posts

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

#211

Post by ifa_ »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #117
amelius wrote: 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.

Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality? People historically mistake plants for being inanimate things with no reactivity, that they are far more simple and stupid than they truly are. Outside of a few exotic examples, plants simply operate on a wider timescale that's basically imperceptible without careful and particular observation.…

yeah light _is_ actually pretty slow and we hit that in networking and optics pretty often if iirc.

like not even on a human level, universally even on a grand scale the speed of light is almost torturously slow, there’s nothing philosophical about it

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

#212

Post by socalgal2 »

j_m_b wrote: post #92

One of my favorite visualizations of the scale of the solar system is from Stephen Hawking's Genius. https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking_genius_ep... It's a hands-on, practical example of how far things are away that we can easily visualize. I highly recommend the rest of the series as well. It's one of the best science shows ever produced. It shows the practical path of scientific discovery. You can w…

Not the same but related? Powers of 10 by Eames

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Interestingly, that Hawking visualization makes all the same affordances mentioned in the 1 pixel visualization. They show the earth and moon to scale, then the video shows an aerial view with all the planets much too large. Jupiter is 2x the size of the sun. Saturn and its rings 2x that.

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

#213

Post by lukan »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #166
ryandrake wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't need a sudden jump. If you had a rocket that accelerated at a pleasant 1G forever, you could reach and stop at the center of the milky way in about 20 (your time) years, and you could reach and stop at the Andromeda galaxy in about 28 years. Play around with some of the online space travel relativity calculators--it's wild! Of course building and fueling such a rocket is what's totally out of reach.

> Of course building and fueling such a rocket is what's totally out of reach. We'd need a device that could efficiently transform several kg of matter to photons.

Also some kind of a energy shield. Space is pretty empty, but if you go fast enough, you will still hit lots of non empty space.

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

#214

Post by lukan »

tanewishly wrote: post #188
nilamo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hm, not sure if that is really less depressing... A starship capable of such a journey is surely large enough to bring all your friends and family along, colony-ship style.

We're already on that starship. Our engine is about 8 lightminutes away. All we need is to figure out how to steer this thing - and how to not wreck it while en route.

I would prefer the concept of people building an artificial planet/asteroid/spaceship for a starship, instead of messing with our star system. But luckily that debate is some years away and currently we cannot even figure out, how to deal with some increased CO2 levels.

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

#215

Post by lisper »

dyauspitr wrote: post #197
lisper wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only seems incredibly slow in this model because it doesn't take special relativity into account. If it did, then as you approached the speed of light the Lorentz contraction would make wherever you are heading appear less far away. You can in theory get anywhere in the universe in an arbitrarily short amount of proper time your own reference frame. Of course, you might not survive the G-forces, but that's another…

You can accelerate continuously at a comfortable 1g and get to 0.5c in about 5 months. G forces are not the issue.

The Lorentz factor at 0.5 c is 0.86 so this only reduces your proper travel time by about 15%. Even at 0.9c the LF is only 0.43, so it would still take you 2 years just to get to Proxima Centauri. And as you approach c, 1G acceleration speeds you less and less. And you also have to slow down at your destination.

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

#216

Post by knoxg »

Look I'm no astronomer, but I'm pretty sure celestial bodies all have elliptical orbits, so if you're going to label something as 'tediously accurate' you should give some indication that the distances from the sun are changing over the orbital period.

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

#218

Post by dahart »

dahart wrote: post #95
susam wrote: post #25

When I was dabbling with POV-Ray many moons ago, I drew the planets of our solar system to scale with it. You can see it here: https://github.com/susam/pov25#planets A friend once asked if I couldn't show the planets in orbit rather than lying flat on a plane. I could, of course, but this is ray tracing. What do planets actually look like to human eyes from Earth? Just tiny dots. If I were to show them in their prope…

Would you have to use double precision to ray trace the planets in their proper orbits at scale using either perspective or orthographic projection? With the ratio of Neptune’s distance from the sun to its radius being almost 2M, I’m guessing fp32 rounding would turn Neptune into a couple of squares if the sun was at the origin. What other challenges would there be? Maybe I’ll try it today just for fun.

I tried it, including Pluto, and it works fine. Shading is quantized at Pluto but the spheres are all round.

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

#219

Post by mjcohen »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #117
amelius wrote: 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.

Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality? People historically mistake plants for being inanimate things with no reactivity, that they are far more simple and stupid than they truly are. Outside of a few exotic examples, plants simply operate on a wider timescale that's basically imperceptible without careful and particular observation.…

For very philosophical writings about this, read "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon. Written in the 1930's, these describe on a very expansive scale the history of, respectively, humanity and the universe. Very mind bending.

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

#220

Post by procgen »

ifa_ wrote: post #211
johnnyjeans wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality? People historically mistake plants for being inanimate things with no reactivity, that they are far more simple and stupid than they truly are. Outside of a few exotic examples, plants simply operate on a wider timescale that's basically imperceptible without careful and particular observation.…

yeah light _is_ actually pretty slow and we hit that in networking and optics pretty often if iirc. like not even on a human level, universally even on a grand scale the speed of light is almost torturously slow, there’s nothing philosophical about it

something can only be "slow" relative to something else. it's not an intrinsic property.
Post reply on HN