this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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Science Memes

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Know your place (reddthat.com)
submitted 3 days ago by LadyButterfly@reddthat.com to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I always loved those examples that show the scale of planets, stars and systems. I remember years ago before I got on the internet (yes I'm that old), reading a comic or book, I can't remember where ... all I remember is the cartoon and illustration.

If you made a scale model of the galaxy and fit it in between the earth and the moon .... our sun would be the size of a marble and it's nearest neighbour would be about a mile away. And some of the largest stars would be about the size of an average office building.

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

The problem is that the human mind can't easily grasp the whole thing at one time, or some parts of the scale aren't relatable enough. Like in your example, we know the Earth-Moon distance is huge abstractly but can't hold it in our mind like we can the marble and building, or even a mile distance, as those we can see. Or in The Epic Spaceman one, all we can understand is that the US is a very large expanse of land and yet our system is small even at that scale. But we can't put the two together easily.

When one gets that brief moment of awareness, it's both awesome and frightening. The last time it happened to me out of the blue was as a kid, looking up at a dark sky with a meteor shower. For a second I had the sense not of looking up at the sky with meteors falling, but of the reality of being on the surface of a rock that was flying around running into a debris cloud. And if I'm in a dark sky area and look long enough at the dense star field I can almost feel the sense of insignificance.

[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 days ago

Same here ... I had those moments of awareness several times when I was a kid learning about all this stuff in school. Together with my background as an Indigenous Canadian (I'm full blooded Ojibway and it's my first language before English) I was always taught by my elders to stay aware of my place in the universe and existence.

We lived in remote northern Ontario away from cities and towns and the sky was always a deep dark expanse, especially on a moonless night. One of the greatest spectacles I ever witnessed was heading out on the winter ice road near Moosonee on James Bay. My friends and I drove out for fun several miles north for fun. It was February and it was a frigid minus 40, no wind, no clouds, the air perfectly still. We stopped at a bit of a rise in the frozen mushkeg where there were no trees. The sky was so dry, so clear and so unobstructed by anything in the air that we could see every star down to the horizon. At that moment, for an instant realized I wasn't looking up .... I was looking at the universe from the edge of a sphere ... it was almost dizzying because if I thought about it too long, I felt as if I were on the edge of a cliff ready to fall off.