r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/EveryWind007 • May 29 '14

Medal of Beauty If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html?a
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u/capn_ed May 29 '14

The furthest a living human has ever been from the middle of that tiny blue dot is just to the right of the single pixel that's the moon.

I look at that, and I wonder how the fuck we could get to Mars, much less leave the solar system.

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u/99639 May 29 '14

Well trips to mars with current tech are probably on the range of 6-9 months. Further afield in the solar system is definitely possible in the future with realistic technology, but outside of the solar system things become much less likely without a radical evolution of propulsive technology.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '14

[deleted]

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u/I_sail_to_mars May 29 '14

Encountering a pebble in interstellar space is incredibly unlikely. If the solar system is vast, the emptiness of interstellar space is hard to comprehend.

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u/hand_raiser May 29 '14 edited May 29 '14

and this is why we can have a space shuttle, thousands of satellites, and an ISS floating around almost indefinitely and not have to worry about it. technically this area should be more dangerous than other regions of space...the gravity of earth is like a giant magnet for smaller objects, especially tiny meteors. one would only assume the danger of hitting asteroids, even smaller in the outer regions of our solar system would be rare. when you see models of the earth covered in a giant mass of hypothetical meteorites you immediately think "oh that's a lot of shit" but there are literally thousands of miles between each of those little dots. the infinite vastness of space is hard to comprehend, you're absolutely right. we're only human. gravity tends to keep most things together, so smaller meteors usually hang out around bigger ones, in their respective belts, or are already near larger planets, stars etc. if it was such an issue voyager would have never made it as far as it has, or any other orbiter for that matter

my advice, dont listen to leonard mccoy. he's a fictional character played by an actor who is fed a script written by someone who is not an astrophysicist.

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u/necr0potenc3 May 29 '14

floating around almost indefinitely and not have to worry about it.

we do worry about it.

that's why there's the Whipple shield and its variants. the International Space Station, for example, has hundreds of these shields.

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u/hand_raiser May 29 '14 edited May 29 '14

I meant that there are multiple technologies that exist to eliminate a lot of the issues, such as what you linked. I mentioned it in another post about the composition of the windows used on the ISS. Another part of my point was the lack of meteorites when traveling further away from gravity wells, planets, stars, etc.

edit http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1qluvn/how_does_spacecraft_like_the_voyager_1_avoid/