Check out this awe-inspiring scale model of our solar system

Shawn Knight

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NASA’s New Horizons mission has sparked a renewed interest in all things space. It also likely inspired a couple of filmmakers to dispel a common myth and build a scale model of our solar system… one that’s seven miles wide.

Virtually every model to date fails to relay just how expansive our solar system truly is and that’s something Wylie Overstreet and Alex Goros set about to change. Using a dry lake bed in the Black Rock Desert north of Reno, the duo built their solar system model complete with planetary orbits.

The project really puts into perspective just how tiny our home planet is compared to what’s around us.

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With the current progress in computer technology, plus the optics, and the amount of real imagery taken by Cassini and earth-orbiting satellites I would think we are getting close to building real-life rendered picture of our solar system, and certainly in real time in terms of the objects' locations and trajectories. Now, that would be both inspiring and quite useful at the same time. But another artist-made model - not so much, not any more.
 
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It's mind boggling. We're nothing more than a speck of dust yet we're arrogant enough think we are it.
I'm surprised to see how old the astronauts Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan and Jim Irwin have gotten. It' seems just like a couple years ago that I watched them prance around on the moon, apart from Lovell that is, Apollo 13 never touched down on the moon.
 
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It's mind boggling. We're nothing more than a speck of dust yet we're arrogant enough think we are it.

Well, given that we are currently stuck here, we practically are "it."

Or won't be, if that asteroid smacks us next week.
 
Really interesting video - made my kids watch it and they enjoyed it too. I also used the VR app Titans of Space to try to convey this same scale to them.
 
This was really well made, thank you!
It also goes really well with this "remastered" version of Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"
 
Well, given that we are currently stuck here, we practically are "it."

Or won't be, if that asteroid smacks us next week.
Yeah we think we're 'it', we have to, but in the greater scheme of things we are nothing. One of these days we'll be as extinct as T-Rex, or maybe we'll have evolved into something else.
 
It's mind boggling. We're nothing more than a speck of dust yet we're arrogant enough think we are it.
I'm surprised to see how old the astronauts Jim Lovell, Gene Cernan and Jim Irwin have gotten. It' seems just like a couple years ago that I watched them prance around on the moon, apart from Lovell that is, Apollo 13 never touched down on the moon.

It's not really arrogance, cause we don't really think this is it. Probability says there should be other life out there, it just probably isn't going to be like star wars or star trek with 1000s of species any life is going to be few and far between. Also just because we haven't worked out how to travel faster than the speed of light, doesn't mean others haven't, we could have the tech is for example 10,000 years which is more than plausible for another planet to have evolved that "bit" earlier and developed such tech.

It's mind boggling more how it in theory goes on and on for ever and ever. I am sure if you could travel to the edge of the known universe you would eventually pass all stars and then there would literally be nothing for ever, but the nothing would be what we perceive as nothing and could very well be a lot more active than we believe.
 
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