Does no one else see a scenario in which aliens extinguish the sun then use warp technology to arrive at Earth precisely one minute before the sun goes out forever, thereby increasing the dramatic verve of their arrival and wiping out the entire planet 60 seconds later? HOW CAN I BE THE ONLY ONE THAT SEES THIS TERRIFYING FUTURE?!

There’s only one answer. Develop a system of nuclear powered rocket boosters (a la Isaac Asimov’s “The Gods Themselves”) and push the Earth closer to the sun. Every other program is basically just whistling in the dark.

I found a great study into how bad people in general are in estimating distance (Miller & Brewer, [i]Int J of Sci Ed[/i] (2010) 32:1549-60). They used a baseball as the earth and asked undergraduates to estimate the distances to the moon, the sun, the nearest star and nearest galaxy and found that on average the estimates were under by 33%, 64%, 93% and 99% respectively. We are REALLY REALLY bad and wrapping our heads around astronomical distances. Or as the very first person who quoted the great Douglas Adams, Space is big. Really big…

A scale model : If a galaxy’s central bulge were a hundred miles across, its central supermassive black hole would be roughly the size of a sand grain.

Source : Page 14, “NewsNotes” in ‘Sky &Telscope ‘magazine, April 2011, VP Publishing.

Is another great if rather specific scale comparison that I stumbled on t’other day.

The Earth is rotating around the Sun, at about 800,000 miles per hour

Erm … I’m not so sure about this figure (and, BTW, the Earth revolves about the sun and rotates about its own axis).

Assuming a mean Earth-sun distance of 93,000,000 miles, the circumference of Earth’s orbit is about 584,000,000 miles (distance Earth travels around the sun over the course of a year). That’s roughly 1,600,000 miles per day or just under 67,000 miles per hour.

Incidentally, just saw Brian Cox’s Wonders of the Solar System documentary. Superluminous (beyond merely brilliant or shiny!) show & that noted another great scale point apparently :

If our Earth is 1 cm from our Sun – & Pluto is 50 cm from it – then the edge of the Oort Cloud of Comet’s would be 1/2 a kilometer away!

Paraphrased from memory so hope I’ve got that right but pretty sure I have.

@ Mag I know of somebody whose little sister was told by her teacher that the moon only comes up at night, and can’t be seen during the day!

I “independently discovered” the daytime Moon in high school. I remember looking up seeing this thing in the sky thinking Wait that’s the Moon even though – whoah! It’s up in the day too!* and being pretty buzzed with it.

Then again, when out camping as a kid one night, I saw a very yellow moon set / rise & convinced myself it must have just been hit by a meteor & turned molten (!) so ..

@127. Mag :

My son (5th grade) came home from school one day last week frustrated with his science “teacher”. His science “teacher” told the class that the moon has no gravity. Her proof? If the moon had gravity it would crash into earth. I was speechless.

Wha .. I .. don’t .. just .. what .. the *science* teacher . . said ..what!!!

That is staggering.

Did you take it up with the school’s principal or would’nt that do any good?

@ Mag I know of somebody whose little sister was told by her teacher that the moon only comes up at night, and can’t be seen during the day!

My son (5th grade) came home from school one day last week frustrated with his science “teacher”. His science “teacher” told the class that the moon has no gravity. Her proof? If the moon had gravity it would crash into earth. I was speechless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode%27s_law

for more on Bode’s law from that usual fount of all knowledge – wikipedia.

Just heard a good new scale comparison watching the rather good TV documentary series The Universe ( 26th Feb. 2011, “7mate” channel 73 -Milky Way epsiode) from one of the people interviewed or producing that :

“If the solar system was the size of a CD then the Milky Way would be the size of the whole Earth.”

***

Few more possible pertinent quotes here :

“If you put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, that cathedral will be more densely packed with grains of sand than stars are found apart in space.”
- Sir James Jeans, British astronomer, quoted on page 28, ‘Skywatching’, David H. Levy, Ken Fin Books, 1995.

“Space isn’t remote at all. Its only an hour away if your car could go straight upwards.”
- Sir Fred Hoyle, P.43, ‘The Wonderful World of Space’, Heather Couper, Octopus Books, 1980.

[But!]

“If it were possible to drive straight from the Earth to Neptune, taking the shortest possible route and keeping up a steady 60 m.p.h., the journey would take nearly 5,200 years.”

– P. 57, ‘The Sky at Night’, Patrick Moore, WW. Norton & Co, 1986.

Just felt a wee bit compelled to express how completely cool & remarkably effective I think your toilet tissue method of conveying a sense of the really, really long-term time scale that the history of planet earth possesses — most especially how, in that full-blown context, the actual written history of everything involving human beings and all things humans have been involved in, barely, just *barely* occupies any space at all — near the very end of the very last square of tissue paper!

I’m pretty, fairly certain that, as a high school student (way back in the day), participating in a truly meaningful learning experience such as this one, I would have been completely astounded — “blown away”, if you will . . . “to infinity & beyond” (courtesy of Buzz LightYear, of course).

Keep up the quality teaching!