https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Pluto (we still love you)

It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Better be some good in-flight entertainment. In case you're wondering, you'd need about 2000 feature-length movies to occupy that many waking hours.

This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. Too bad they're all too small to appear on this map.

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. So if you're planning on taking a trip to Jupiter, you might want to use a different map.

If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets. The New Horizons space craft that launched in 2006 only took 13 months to get to Jupiter. Don't worry. It'll take a lot less than 13 months to scroll there.

I guess this is why most maps of the solar system aren't drawn to scale. It's not hard to draw the planets. It's the empty space that's a problem.

When it comes to things like the age of the earth, the number of snowflakes in Siberia, the national debt... Those things are too much for our brains to handle.

We need to reduce things down to something we can see or experience directly in order to understand them.

You would need 2128 of these screens lined up side-by-side to show this whole map at once.

If this map was printed from a quality printer (300 pixels per inch) the earth would be invisible, and the width of the paper would need to be 475 feet. 475 feet is about 1 and 1/2 football fields.

Even though we don’t really understand them, a lot can happen within these massive lengths of time and space. A drop of water can carve out a canyon. An amoeba can become a dolphin. A star can collapse on itself.

It’s a good thing we have these tiny stars and planets, otherwise we’d have no point of reference at all. We’d be surrounded by this stuff that our minds weren’t built to understand.

"Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."

The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying.

When you hear people talk about how, "there’s more to this universe than our minds can conceive of" it's usually a way to get you to go along with a half-baked plot point about UFOs or super-powers in a sci-fi series that you're watching late at night when you can’t get to sleep.

But all this empty space, these things of a massive scale, really are more than our minds can conceive of. The maps and metaphors fail to do them justice.

You look at one tiny dot, then you look for the next tiny dot. Everything in between is inconsequential and fairly boring.

Some theories say all this emptiness is actually full of energy or dark matter and that nothing can truly be empty... but come on, only ordinary matter has any meaning for us.