If the Moon Were Only One Pixel

Photo ©Josh Worth (www.joshworth.com)

There are plenty of great reasons to love electronic media, but one thing that they do best—that you really can't do in just about any other communications medium—is demonstrate concepts in wildy interactive ways.

Case in point:  Graphic designer Josh Worth found himself struggling to describe the scale of the solar system to his young daughter, and realized that our brains aren't really equipped to handle really large numbers.

So he built If the Moon Were Only One Pixel, an interactive scale map of our solar system, using a single pixel to represent the diameter of our moon.  It's crazily effective in helping us wrap our heads around the distances involved in our solar system alone (let alone between stars).  If you want to understand exactly how small, and how precious life on Earth is, you need to experience this.

The real lesson here is that you couldn't do this in just about any other medium.  You could do try to do something similar in the real world (in fact, some people have tried), but even that won't give you the true scale of both sizes of celestial bodies and distances in solar system.

So do yourself a favor.  Take the time to scroll through our solar system, and get an idea of how small you are.

Pro tip:  Use the left and right arrows on the navigation (see the screen shot below) to "hyperlink" to the next milestone.  It makes the trip through the solar system a lot faster, even if it is cheating.