Space!

[pyat]

When I was a kid, outer space was chock full of stuff. It was like Flash Gordon or The Little Prince - new moons and asteroids every few miles. When I got older, the size and scope and emptiness of the solar system was impressed upon me. All that "If Earth was a peanut in Ottawa, then Jupiter would be a volley ball at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and Pluto would be a mustard seed floating in a glass of water at the South Pole of the Moon," stuff.

But as time goes by, the solar system seems to be filling up again:

Green = Kuiper belt object
Orange = Scattered disc object or Centaur
Pink = Trojan asteroids trailing Jupiter
Yellow = Trojan asteroids trailing Neptune

The Asteroid Belt, moons, and rocky planets aren't even listed. And this is just the known list of objects in these categories. There are expected to be more than 70,000 Kuiper Belt Objects, many of them planet-sized. The inner bodies are mostly rocky objects with lots of heavy minerals. Further out, they're treasure troves of frozen chemicals - even water ice.

Also, as a kid I remember being perplexed by the weird fish-eye perspective of the Soviet Venera probe panoramas from the surface of Venus. Modern image processing has converted these distended photos into more comprehensible subjective views...


Yes, it's Venus! And, like every other planet we've landed on, it looks a lot like Sudbury in the 1970s!

Comments

[shadow-maze.livejournal.com]

It's still a whole lot of nothing, and that is just the solar system. Once you get past that, then you are really, really out with nothing.

I was just checking, and our Sun has 99.85% of the matter in the whole system, and Jupiter has more than 2/3 of the rest, leaving all those little dots with not too much to share. The whole asteroid belt doesn't add up to 1/1000th the Earth.

If you were out for a quick drive in your trusty flying car (100km or 60 miles an hour), just getting to the Moon takes 23 weeks, and a quick visit to the Sun takes 170 years, and those are very close compared to Kuiper Belt stuff. Even Pluto is closer and that would be 6745 years or longer.

I wouldn't plan on any space rock hopping without a really fast ship and a great deal of spare time...

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Well, current engines can drive a probe the size of a cargo van at in excess of 60,000 kph, and if they had more leeway with nuclear engines, you'd get a long of life out of them. And, as I noted earlier in some places the density is such that you can fly to new places every couple of days.