I know stuff. It's what I do. So people ask me questions. Typically space questions, but about a lot of other subjects, too. One of the trickier things to explain about space is size and distance. In Star Trek a trip between Earth and the middle of Orion's belt is a few days at high warp. They can get there in about the same time it takes us to get to our own moon. How do you explain light years to people who will almost certainly never travel further than 12,500 miles from the place they were born? Light moves so fast that to us it's indistinguishable from instantaneous travel. It takes 8 minutes for it to get here from the Sun, but how far is that, really? A fit guy on a bike can make it across DC in 20-25 minutes. The light from the nearest star to our own is four and a half years old when we see it. But it would take generations for someone to get from here to there. We have a hard enough time thinking beyond the next fiscal quarter, let alone what our great, great, great grandchildren's careers will be.
Anyway, I collect props for helping to explain this stuff. This video is the latest.
All the objects in our star system that are bigger than 200 miles across. (click to enlarge)
Another picture for size scale. (click to enlarge)
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