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

231–240 of 273 posts

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

#231

Post by notjoemama »

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.…

Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be white and brown dwarfs. Although, if we could orbit black holes and harness the energy of gravity, then we're really talking long time scales. Cracking the aging problem would allow us to think in very long timescales. But I do wonder whether the human psyche could handle such long lifespans.

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

#232

Post by rnjesus »

amelius wrote: post #91
Sharlin wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the chances of hitting a small meteorite or part of it, traveling now at relativistic speeds wrt you?

zero if you hit that spice first

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

#233

Post by manquer »

bandrami wrote: post #230

I've always thought that people pushing for colonization or even commercial exploitation of space simply don't have a good sense of how far things are and how empty the space between us and those things are.

That has always been the case, there is loads of empty distance between big population centers even today there are big cities many hours by flight from anywhere else of interest.

In the age of sail, people were perfectly willing to spend months in transit .

Transit times for most objects of commercial interest (i.e. upto moons of Saturns) is only in years if you use a low energy/Delta-v Hohmann transfer orbits and/or gravity assists as is common today for probes.

Direct transfer would be expected for human transits , those can be fairly quick . Transfers to mars within the next 1-2 decades is doable in 6months or less.

There are no fundamental breakthroughs needed to go any orbits we would be interested in 1 year or less by end of this century.

On the other hand I do agree going interstellar is a whole different scale of empty and without near light speed (even with ) is probably out of reach .

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

#234

Post by rstuart4133 »

knoxg wrote: post #216

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.

Didn't have the patience to read the fine article? Understandable I guess, but I thought it was worth the effort. Quoting from it:

> All these distances are just averages, mind you. The distance between planets really depends on where the two planets are in their orbits around the sun.

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

#235

Post by Dylan16807 »

Sharlin wrote: post #84
pc86 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?”

For the record, this HN page is already about halfway to overflowing uint16. The most popular HN page in the last day would overflow uint16.

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

#236

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

notjoemama wrote: post #231
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.…

Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be…

> in comparison to the distances that exist

This leaves out the time component. Who's to say that a year is long? A galaxy a million light years away takes a million years to reach... and maybe that's a short amount of time, to the right observer.

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

#237

Post by randalsedgewick »

davidee wrote: post #120
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.…

Thanks for this. In addition to the insight, it reminded me to water a plant at a desk I no longer use. The plant's been with me through quite a bit and I have been neglecting it recently as I no longer see it regularly.

In turn this reminded me to water my terribly neglected office plant, so thank you!

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

#239

Post by tim333 »

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.…

At the moment humans only live ~90 years which is a blip in cosmic terms, but shortly we should be able to merge with AI and live for billions of years and visit stars.

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

#240

Post by mgraczyk »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #236
notjoemama wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light is comparatively and objectively slow in comparison to the distances that exist. Andromeda is 1M light years from us. From that perspective, 300k kph is oddly slow actually. I love the passion that you're brining to the table though. It reminded me of the blue giant stars whose lifespans can be as short as tens of millions of years, more often hundreds though. For billions upon billions, I suppose that would be…

> in comparison to the distances that exist This leaves out the time component. Who's to say that a year is long? A galaxy a million light years away takes a million years to reach... and maybe that's a short amount of time, to the right observer.

Light could only go to Andromeda and back 1000 times before the sun burns out. That's not very many times IMO. On the scale of galaxies, light is slow relative to any timescale relevant to large objects.
Post reply on HN