Page Up and Page Down do not work with sideways scrolling, so the keyboard shortcuts aren't as useful as you imagine (it takes ages to scroll using a keyboard) and so accessibility is quite broken.
I think vertical scrolling worked well in that case because it was used to display depth. The information you are displaying is literally about going down. Horizontal scrolling feels more natural to me here because the point is to show how empty and vast the area between planets is.
The downside is that it's an experience that admittedly only works if you're using a trackpad, or a mouse with good side-scrolling support. So people with laptops / trackpad mice are probably okay.
A little known fact seems to be that if you hold Option (or was it command?) on OS X while using the mouse wheel, you scroll horizontally instead of vertically. Found that out by accident.
Neat! My favorite way to show the impossibly large scale of our universe: http://spaceengine.org/. Set your speed to 10 light years per second and watch the Andromeda galaxy just sit there.
Also fun to see how slow even the speed of light is. Start at the sun and head for earth. Once you reach Earth marvel at how fast you had been going.
Head towards Jupiter and, once again, marvel at how impossibly slow your going compared to even the nearest background stars.
Playing with its zoom function is fun (Page Up/Down/Home). You can basically reproduce the Hubble Deep Field with it by bumping up the galaxy magnitude limit (F8) and zooming in until the indicator in the lower right reads around 2'30".
And of course you can click on a galaxy and fly to it with a press of the g key. Watching thousands of galaxies zip by like stars in Star Trek is pretty mindboggling (also note that high warp is somewhere around 20 AU/sec using the TNG scale...)
Not nearly in same league as Space Engine. I installed both just now. Celestia is already uninstalled after 5 minutes. It's too basic and the navigation controls are lacking compared with SpaceEngine - which is remarkable in how well it allows you to fly great distances at enormous speeds, with easy adjustment to for slowing down and re-positioning.
The other planets are far away, other solar systems are far away, and the galaxy is huge.
But after that, the neighboring galaxies are surprisingly close. If we take 150k light years to be the diameter of Milky Way, and Andromeda is 2500k light years away, the distance between galaxies is less than 20 times the diameter of our galaxy.
This is inaccurate. At even 1g acceleration Andromeda is just 28 years away. At 10 light years per second you would have passed it many many years ago.
And what he said was nonsense; 10 LY/s is faster than light; you must be a hypothetical particle with some crazy properties and our math really breaks down at that point.
In space you need to think in terms of relative velocities less than c and acceleration. To get a reasonable sense of how far away Andromeda is consider how long it will take to get there, which is just a few years.
Are you talking about the Andromeda Galaxy? The one that is 2,500,000 light years away? At a constant 10 light years per second speed, that's 69 hours.
Also, even ignoring relativistic effects, it would take a very long time to get there at 1g acceleration.
I think that taking traveler time instead of observer time when the discussion is scale of the universe isn't what people would expect. But I do agree that ignoring the relativity here is silly -- of course it makes the observer time close to the 2.5 million years you would expect given its distance.
And thanks for the site. Do you know whether it takes into account deceleration? Because getting to Andromeda at .99c isn't going to do much good unless you're heading somewhere else...
> Do you know whether it takes into account deceleration?
Looks like it does. If I plug in a distance of 980m and acceleration of 9.8m/s^2, it gives a 20s time. That's 10s of acceleration (0.5 * 9.8 * 100 == 490m traveled) and 10s of deceleration.
I would love to be able to print it to scale on A4 paper (with white background of course). Posted on a long wall the results would be very interesting ;-)
In Florianópolis, Brazil, there's a thing called Projeto Helius where someone has placed plaques along the waterfront showing the locations of the planets, to scale. They start off deceptively close together for the inner planets, just a few minutes' walk apart, but then it really takes a while to reach the outer planets.
I walked as far as Neptune but, like the author of the above blog post, didn't continue on to Pluto. (It isn't depicted on the map, but I just checked and all of these markers are Ingress portals/Pokestops, so it's easy to find other people's maps that show them. Pluto is a little south of the end of the park there.)
It's the same scale, 1:10^9, and is about seven and a half kilometres long. Each station has a model of the planet, to scale. The sun is a big yellow ball on a post. The gas giants are small balls. The rocky planets are little flecks of material encased in plastic...
There are two Plutos, marking the summer and winter extremes.
This is well executed but I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with the genially philosophical textual content and craving the nihilist edition of the same thing. In a way it's a wasted opportunity to generate a day of healthy despair.
Every time I see these types of visualizations, I get the feeling of sadness, that we'll never visit other worlds outside of our own. The immensity of space is just incomprehensible. The closest star system Alpha Centauri, is over FOUR light years away. Time dilation will ensure that we will never again see whomever we send out into deep space.
That's not true. The primary reason we want to travel to other planets and stars is because we want to learn more. There's only so much a telescope can detect. Without going there, you won't even have what to simulate.
And the other reason for why we want to travel is because we want colonies. Given consumerism, population growth and the destruction of our environment, it gets pretty clear that we need a backup plan. This is why we still need human spaceflight, even if sending robots is much cheaper for discovery and learning purposes. And again, simulation is pointless.
Absolutely, those are very good points, though not all of those problems are best solved by manned missions (e.g. exploration can be more efficiently performed if life-support systems are unnecessary). Increasing human survival odds definitely does require manned missions.
But, from a cultural enrichment/learning/individual experience perspective (which I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed the parent comment was referring to) a sufficiently accurate simulation with appropriate man/machine interfaces is a far more efficient solution than manned spaceflight over interstellar distances (provided people can get over their discomfort with the ontology of simulacra).
Like compound interest, constant acceleration is powerful. 10/m/s/s gets you to 30,000 m/s in 3,000s. That's .1c in less than an hour. The energy required is mv^2, m being the mass of your vehicle, and you can annihilate anti-matter to get, theoretically, Mc^2 of energy out of it. That means you can get to .1c with M=mv^2/c^2=.1^2 or 1% of your vehicle mass of anti-matter. That's a small enough number to leave a lot of wiggle room.
(Much smaller, and more realistic, accelerations are possible over longer periods of time, but require using the use of relativistic equations of motion.)
I think you mixed up m/s and km/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s, so 30,000 m/s is only .0001c. At 1g, it actually takes a month to reach .1c. (Still, your point stands.)
It's nice to see this again. The revelation that space is so big and empty is one that more people need to see. I especially recommend finding and visiting one of the scale models of the Solar System. I visited and walked the one in Melbourne, Australia.
They are referenced in previous discussions of this particular item. Here are some:
On a phone i scrolled basically as fast as possible all the way to the end, stopping for a few seconds at each dialog, and it was at least a 10 minute ride. I loved the wit along the way!
>"We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand."
It is interesting to compare this to what was believed during the dawn of the scientific revolution, eg Isaac Newton's attitude (that the universe was built for humans to understand it). Both positions are speculative, but asserted as facts in their time with far reaching effects.
Interesting that you state Isaac Newton's attitude as fact. When I Google "isaac newton universe built for humans to understand" unquoted, I don't find any support for this statement. In fact, this thread ends up as one of the top hits.
This is perfect -- you yourself seem to think that in order to understand what the post you replied to is saying, all you need to do is google a bunch of words from it. Hypotheses non fingo, indeed.
That was more a paraphrase of the impression you get reading him. It was surprisingly difficult to find some kind of quote from him on the intelligibility of nature (it looks like it is one of those topics that has generated a lot of low quality commentary). Here is the closest I could find for now:
>"Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles.[55] These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed man to pursue his own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect himself with his own rational powers.[56]"
You can also read his principles of philosophy and general scholium to get an idea of his views. You will see he believed in a creator that made the universe as simple as possible:
In this clever visualization, space is 1702774 pixels wide. At 1366 pixels width of my screen, the printed version would be 1246 screens-long, that is roughly 500 meters (0.3 miles). I am able to scroll horizontally the total screen-width in roughly 200ms, that is, my mouse can travel at 2500 m/s.
Very cool. One suggestion to give an even better perspective is to... literally give a first person perspective from the planets on what the sun and other planets looks like in the distance. So on Mercury, the sun would look relative large compared to venus, earth, mars, etc.
I was reading the comments at the top. One said something about 7 months to get to Mars being 2,000 feature-length movies of waking hours. I know its old news, but I remember having a 20MB hard drive back in the day. Now you could easily fit 2000+ movies on one 10TB hard drive that costs less than $500.
The absolute worst thing with this website is thinking that scrolling with your mouse is way too slow, turning on light speed and realising it goes slower.
Well, we're not getting to another solar system in my lifetime, it's fine.
At 177 light minutes into the journey, there is the following message:
Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.
leaving 4.2E-21 or 0.0000000000000000000042% non-emptiness in the universe.
I can't find any sources backing up this figure, but I wonder if it was the author's intent to smuggle in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.
Edit: Just saw the second reference to this at 208 light minutes.
As I was scrolling I stopped to read the little messages about how empty stuff was, etc. Which kind of distorted my view of how far apart things actually were, as my scrolling slowed as I stopped to read them.
86 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThe BBC did this site about director James Cameron exploring the depths of the ocean, and I think it works really well with vertical scrolling: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17013285
Why? Since there is no vertical scrolling your mouse scrolls sideways.
The downside is that it's an experience that admittedly only works if you're using a trackpad, or a mouse with good side-scrolling support. So people with laptops / trackpad mice are probably okay.
Also fun to see how slow even the speed of light is. Start at the sun and head for earth. Once you reach Earth marvel at how fast you had been going.
Head towards Jupiter and, once again, marvel at how impossibly slow your going compared to even the nearest background stars.
And of course you can click on a galaxy and fly to it with a press of the g key. Watching thousands of galaxies zip by like stars in Star Trek is pretty mindboggling (also note that high warp is somewhere around 20 AU/sec using the TNG scale...)
Example I made a few days ago: https://imgur.com/a/xyZe8
The other planets are far away, other solar systems are far away, and the galaxy is huge.
But after that, the neighboring galaxies are surprisingly close. If we take 150k light years to be the diameter of Milky Way, and Andromeda is 2500k light years away, the distance between galaxies is less than 20 times the diameter of our galaxy.
In space you need to think in terms of relative velocities less than c and acceleration. To get a reasonable sense of how far away Andromeda is consider how long it will take to get there, which is just a few years.
Also, even ignoring relativistic effects, it would take a very long time to get there at 1g acceleration.
d = a * t² / 2
2.3652e22 meters = 9.80665 m/s² * t² / 2
4.7304e22 meters = 9.80665 m/s² * t²
4.8237e21 s² = t²
6.9453e10 seconds = t
That's about 2200 years, not 28.
Try entering the numbers here: http://nathangeffen.webfactional.com/spacetravel/spacetravel...
And thanks for the site. Do you know whether it takes into account deceleration? Because getting to Andromeda at .99c isn't going to do much good unless you're heading somewhere else...
Looks like it does. If I plug in a distance of 980m and acceleration of 9.8m/s^2, it gives a 20s time. That's 10s of acceleration (0.5 * 9.8 * 100 == 490m traveled) and 10s of deceleration.
They're very cool.
Edit: Ah, autoscrolling works.
>It's not hard to draw the planets.
>It's the empty space that's the problem.
– Beatles, The Fool on the Hill (1967)
http://www.1000dias.com/rodrigo/avenida-beira-mar-sistema-so...
I walked as far as Neptune but, like the author of the above blog post, didn't continue on to Pluto. (It isn't depicted on the map, but I just checked and all of these markers are Ingress portals/Pokestops, so it's easy to find other people's maps that show them. Pluto is a little south of the end of the park there.)
A little less the same than Heinlein's original context, though Pluto was involved there, too. Anybody catch the reference?
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetenweg_Uetliberg
It's the same scale, 1:10^9, and is about seven and a half kilometres long. Each station has a model of the planet, to scale. The sun is a big yellow ball on a post. The gas giants are small balls. The rocky planets are little flecks of material encased in plastic...
There are two Plutos, marking the summer and winter extremes.
https://www.evergreenmuseum.org/
And the other reason for why we want to travel is because we want colonies. Given consumerism, population growth and the destruction of our environment, it gets pretty clear that we need a backup plan. This is why we still need human spaceflight, even if sending robots is much cheaper for discovery and learning purposes. And again, simulation is pointless.
But, from a cultural enrichment/learning/individual experience perspective (which I, perhaps incorrectly, assumed the parent comment was referring to) a sufficiently accurate simulation with appropriate man/machine interfaces is a far more efficient solution than manned spaceflight over interstellar distances (provided people can get over their discomfort with the ontology of simulacra).
(Much smaller, and more realistic, accelerations are possible over longer periods of time, but require using the use of relativistic equations of motion.)
They are referenced in previous discussions of this particular item. Here are some:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 (178 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 (20 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 (17 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 (11 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 (4 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419190 (3 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13233679 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876633 (1 comment)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834512 (1 comment)
There are other submissions without any comments - for completeness I thought I'd include those that I could find - there may be others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13285043
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12870694
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280935
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12273629
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10943525
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10240476
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9469999
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728435
There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist.
We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.
aside from being a great visualisation - it's really well annotated
It is interesting to compare this to what was believed during the dawn of the scientific revolution, eg Isaac Newton's attitude (that the universe was built for humans to understand it). Both positions are speculative, but asserted as facts in their time with far reaching effects.
>"Newton refashioned the world governed by an interventionist God into a world crafted by a God that designs along rational and universal principles.[55] These principles were available for all people to discover, allowed man to pursue his own aims fruitfully in this life, not the next, and to perfect himself with his own rational powers.[56]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Isaac_Newto...
You can also read his principles of philosophy and general scholium to get an idea of his views. You will see he believed in a creator that made the universe as simple as possible:
https://isaacnewton.ca/newtons-general-scholium/
http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/newton-princ.asp
Here's another visualisation, using a soccer ball and American football pitches. It includes "planet 9", which is a staggering distance away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR5VJo5ifdE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYC_Z36rHw
Well, we're not getting to another solar system in my lifetime, it's fine.
At 177 light minutes into the journey, there is the following message:
Emptiness is actually everywhere. It’s something like 99.9999999999999999999958% of the known universe.
leaving 4.2E-21 or 0.0000000000000000000042% non-emptiness in the universe.
I can't find any sources backing up this figure, but I wonder if it was the author's intent to smuggle in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.
Edit: Just saw the second reference to this at 208 light minutes.
As I was scrolling I stopped to read the little messages about how empty stuff was, etc. Which kind of distorted my view of how far apart things actually were, as my scrolling slowed as I stopped to read them.
Other than that, really cool.
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