This week's book giveaway is in the Agile and other Processes forum. We're giving away four copies of The Mikado Method and have Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund on-line! See this thread for details.
If the Earth was the size of a basketball, the International Space Station would be about 1 cm above the surface. That's as far as we can get a human today.
By contrast, 40 years ago, we were sending humans to the moon, which at the same scale is (IIRC) roughly 8.5 meters away.
If my math is correct (and it may not be), the Sun would be about 1.5 kilometers away.
and even that distance is insignificant when you get into the size of the galaxy...
Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't think there is an official name for that scale. It is just something that one of my favorite bloggers, Phil Plait, uses. Most people are familiar with the size of a basketball, and are often amazed at the 1 cm vs. 8 meter difference.
fred rosenberger wrote:If my math is correct (and it may not be), the Sun would be about 1.5 kilometers away.
Bear Bibeault wrote:Wolfram Alpha failed me, so I had to do the math myself. The "basketball scale" is 1 in 53911184.51613 (rounded to 5 figures) or 1.855 x 10-8
According to Wikipedia, the circumference of a basketball is 75 cm. The circumference of Earth at the equator is 40,000 km. So that would mean the basketball scale is indeed approximately what Bear said (if you divide those numbers it's 1.875 x 10-8).
The average distance to the Sun is 150 million km, so at the basketball scale that would be about 2.8 km.
The average distance to the Moon is about 380,000 km, so at the basketball scale that would be about 7.1 m.
A few years ago I was visiting a friend who lives in Zürich, Switzerland. Near to his home was a park with a scale model of the Solar System. It was a lot smaller than the basketball scale, I think the Earth was about an inch across. The Sun was a large ball, I think 1 or 1.5 m across. The whole model was a few hundred meters long.
Hello guys,universe scale is good one its very helpful for the first man who was go to the moon with the help of the scale but i think if earth is so closeed to the erath what did you said when all universe things destroyed and this sun is near to the point of 1.5km..what did you think about it??its right or not ??
The cosmic scales are truly unimaginable. I especially love one description of the size of the largest known star: if you take a commercial airliner and have it go around that star (assuming melt-proof aircraft and a really big fleet of aircraft tankers, of course ), it would take a thousand years to fly around the star's equator once!
When viewing the sun (btw...DON'T), the center is closer than the edges (since it is a sphere-ish like object). That means the light from the outside of the disk we see takes longer to get here than the center. The sun is so large that this makes a difference of about 2.5 seconds. In other words, the edge of the sun we see is 2.5 seconds younger than the center.
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fred rosenberger wrote:The sun is so large that this makes a difference of about 2.5 seconds.
This didn't sound right to me so I did the math -- and it checks out! Sun diameter ~ 865K miles, distance ~93M miles, time for light to reach earth ~8.3 minutes. The sun is surprisingly large compared to its distance from us -- close to 1% of the distance.
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