This is a thought exercise I used with my friends at a stargazing session to help them understand big numbers:
You have ten fingers and ten toes. Ten miles can probably get you to a friend's house. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was president.

Ten times ten is one hundred. One hundred miles is about the distance from Washington D.C. to Richmond, Virginia. One hundred years ago, Teddy Roosevelt was president.

One thousand miles is roughly how far Ernest Shackleton sailed to save his crew or the distance from our town to Florida. One thousand years ago, it was the Middle Ages.

One million miles will take you way past the moon, but not yet to Venus or Mars. One million years ago, it was the Plestocene Epoch and humans were still evolving.

One billion miles is about a third of the way to Pluto. One billion years ago, some diamonds that you wear today were still forming.

One trillion miles gets you pretty far away from Earth. The nearest star is about 25 trillion miles away and even the sun's light takes four years to get there. One trillion years ago is before the Big Bang and thus impossible.

Comments?

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I think Pluto is over 3 billion miles away.

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Encarta says it's some hundred millions from the sun.

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

On this board it is very important to always double-check your facts.

And there is no such thing as a 100% reliable source.
People made it.

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Textbooks are pretty reliable, considering how many hands they go through. Astronomy Today, 5th Ed., gives the semi-major axis of Pluto's orbit as 3.67 billion miles away.

Sure, it is easy for everyone to comprehend ten fingers and toes.

But once you start expanding the model, even the smartest of you have a hard time visualizing the distances involved.

For example, hold both hands in front of you, thumbs touching and fingers spread wide. Earth resides at the tip of your left pinky. The edge of the universe resides at the tip of your right. If your an NBA power forward the distace between the two may be only two feet. Fine.

But trying to analogize that distance in universal terms, is quite tough. The sun is 93 million miles away, but can any of us truly comprehend such distances.

To paraphrase the rule of goverment spending...add billions and billions of miles and soon you're talking about serious distances. Or Don Adams...Space is big. REALLY BIG. You simply can't imagine how hugely, incredibly big it is.

Sure we can all add, but does that mean we are capable of understanding the numbers??

Methinks not. Unless you've driven it.

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I think you mean Douglas Adams, not Don Adams.

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Missed it by that much.

Multiplying by ten is good. Two also works:
http://www.freemars.org/jeff/2exp100/question.htm

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Sorry, chief!

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In which case I would measure it in terms of tankfulls of gas and number of potty stops.

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"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

DOH!!

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You might consider changing your time factor from years to seconds, as you have run out of years by the time you reach our nearest neighbouring star, then again, you are also running out of words to describe miles too! Perhaps the powers of approach is better?

For teenage girls who went to public shool? Probably times-ten is easier to instinctively grasp.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Does that mean you read the web pages I linked above, or is it
a coincidence?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

The last "ice age" was 10,000 years ago. The earth may have been in an ice age a million years ago, but I think it's gone in and out of ice age a few times since.Is some 37?

Thanks. I've fixed the figure for Pluto.
It wasn't all girls, there were some boys.
I wasn't going any farther than trillions, just because we were talking about planets.

__________________
I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

I've heard quotes that the average density of the universe is about one molecule per cubic meter. Considering the fact that there are 33 billion billion molecules of water in a single drop, that tells you how empty it really is.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

It's a homeopathic universe!

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Nah. Too concentrated.

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