Maybe not wasteful but “generous.”
As it turns out the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but also 400x closer. Makes for awesome eclipses. Though I’d love to see something like Jupiter from Europa’s surface.
I always break out the meter sticks and make a meter cube after asking my students how many cm3 are in a meter cubed. But while we can show a billion grains of sand or even a billion grains of rice, I don’t think the concept of a billion miles means much except really far distance.
A lot of people thought there was one galaxy in the early 1900s. Having hard data on the actual extent of space…. Not that we even know that today… but intergalactic distances and so forth is new. But yeah, the other stuff may be overblown but I’m not sure a few examples from really educated people overturns the gist of the statements. I think the findings snowballed and we got smaller and smaller over time.
Touché. Wording will be altered.
I do wonder if a century from now, humans will be amazed at how we thought there was only one universe when in reality, there are gazillions.
Maybe but personally not a fan. Looks like philosophical, scientific speculation. Science requires testable predictions and the ability to be falsified. The universe very much looks fine tuned for life. I think the multiverse is the way around that via the inverse gambler’s fallacy.
Vinnie
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Saw a quote from Michael Shermer:
“Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?”
― Michael Shermer, [Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design]
Multiverse theology is becoming creedal for some.
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I’m behind on my string theory homework. (You still can’t have an infinite regress into eternity past. Cats ya know.)
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Hawking wasn’t too intellectually impaired and said time had a beginning:
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’'Tain’t; 'cause I said so."
Q.E.D.
That’s the ratio of the ratios of their surface areas and volumes.
The moon’s SA (and disk to scale) is sixteen thousand times smaller and its volume sixty four million.
It’s part of rational faith.
Yeah - that probably added what … a half a dozen more zeroes on the ends of some already pretty big numbers?! A spatially significant change indeed! As to its psychological significance on us, it might be interesting to do this thought experiment (which maybe isn’t so psychologically hypothetical anyway, given our imaginations with multiverse stuff). But let’s just stick to this one physical cosmos here: What if we discovered the “edge” of our universe tomorrow? We finally found that elusive boundary beyond which there seemed to be comparative void. But then, a yet more powerful telescope spots a speck of light “out there”, and then another, and then a host, and we realize that those “specks” were entire other universes just like ours? …Bring out the next half a dozen or dozen zeros to tack onto our already big numbers! But here’s the thrust of my point: how would such a discovery impact you? Would you feel a “sea change” in how you thought of our place in the cosmos? When your “speck of dust” now gets reduced to something like atoms? My thought is that once something is already nearly zero as our portion of the cosmos is, then making it even closer to zero isn’t really that much of a change. Once the cookie you thought you had in your hand became a mere crumb, it’s probably of little additional consequence to you if I then show up with a razor blade and turn your possessed crumb into a microscopic speck. They already had enough geometrical awareness even as far back a Ptolemy (or even before - I can’t remember specifically) to know that earth is relatively small. And as far as them still psychologically clinging to their own personal significance in this vast cosmos - they certainly did, just as we continue to do in our own way now today. That bit, I don’t think we’ve left behind as much as we like to think. We may spatially be reduced to subatomic specks, … but … there always seems to be that eternal “but” that even now the most hard core skeptics can’t seem to quite dispose of.
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That’s desire, not evidence. And calling anyone who has a sense of proportion a hard core sceptic is like calling social justice extremely left wing.
I’m not following your logic there.
And in any case, my subject wasn’t “science” or “evidence”. It was “how we psychologically interact with such proportions”.
“hard core sceptics” was just my shorthand for referring to people who still today make much of how our relative smallness supposedly decimates all prior worldviews, as if our smallness was the provincial discovery of the last few centuries. I probably should have chosen a different term … perhaps “blissfully naive modernists” would have been a more descriptively accurate phrase.
Yes, volume-wise you could fit 1.3 million earths in the sun and the moon is smaller than the earth. The context is “appearance in the sky” and NASA uses this language but I just realized how misleading that probably is to a lot of people when they hear it…
Nowhere does 400 figure as a factor in “appearance in the sky", where does NASA use it?
The full moon is a million times dimmer than the sun too.
I guess “esoterism” is in the eye of the beholder. Because the example you give sounds incredibly interesting - and yet remains beyond my comprehension (and therefore beyond my full appreciation - even with the very helpful looking diagrams) simply because of the complexity of your subject matter. We mathematicians and physical science people have such simple subject matter compared to the complexity you bio folks have to deal with. Math and unit multipliers are so elementary compared to biology, much less genetics.
Thanks for trying, though!
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I’m not aware of any. King David obviously felt insignificant under the Milky - Gk. galaxías - Way. But a bit of quantification goes a long way.
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During a total solar eclipse, the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. This completely blocks out the Sun’s light. However, the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun. How can it block all of that light?
Even though the Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun, it’s also about 400 times closer to Earth than the Sun is. This means that from Earth, the Moon and the Sun appear to be roughly the same size in the sky.
I believe the missing word is diameter but that may be a kids page.
SUn = 865370mi
Moon = 2159mi
Divide = 400.
400x smaller is common and is from the perspective of a disc in the sky but more precise language should include the word diameter.
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very good.
And then just remember, that ratio (400) applies to linear measurements only.
For any area measurements (like … area of visible-to-us disk) has a ratio of 400^2 (although the angular area to our vision presents as the same due to different distances), and for anything volumetric, the ratio must then get cubed (400^3). Hence the many millions of moons needed to equal the volume of the sun.
You had better take a quick photo and get back in your radiation-proof spaceship.
Leaded glass might be able to block the radiation, but the heft of the spacecraft needed will probably preclude human visits in the foreseeable future. That’s one of the reasons people had a bit of a chuckle about Elon Musk’s picture of one of his manned rockets on Europa with a person walking out on the surface.