It’s a matter of perspective.

It’s a matter of perspective.

December 9, 2014, 8:46 pm
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait, Science, Slate, Space | Tags: asteroid, Astronomical Unit, astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Douglas Adams, fear, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, jim downey, Light-year, Moon, Phil Plait, science, Slate, space, UR116, Wikipedia

Phil Plait has another in a long series of articles about a space rock that isn’t going to hit Earth. Seriously:

This is Part N of what is apparently an infinite series of “No, Asteroid XXX Is Not Going to Hit the Earth” posts.

I’m sure he’s right. I have no doubt that he’s right. The latest rock in question isn’t going to get any closer than about 5 million kilometers. Which, as Plait notes: “That’s a pretty wide margin, well over 10 times the distance to the Moon.”

But I think that the problem with this kind of thing is that most people just have no clue how great that distance actually is. Seriously. I remember reading that a series of studies were done where if you asked people what they thought of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon was in terms of distance, where the Earth was represented by a basketball and the Moon by a softball, they’d typically say that the distance between the two was about a foot. Some would say a yard. As in, 3 feet. Maybe they’d say a meter if they were feeling sciency.

Whereas the proportional distance would be more like 24′ in actuality. (Based on just memory, I originally said 18′. A friend who actually knows this stuff gave me the correct number – thanks, Brent!)

Space is big. Most people have no damned clue how big. So when you say that some fast-moving rock will pass by the Earth by as much as 10x the distance of the Earth to the Moon, they’ll get scared, thinking that it is going to be a hell of a lot closer than it actually is.

It’s all a matter of perspective, not science. Like most things.

Jim Downey

Edited to add: My friend Brent, who set me straight on the actual proportion above, added a comment on FB to note that if you have the distance of the Sun-Earth (one AU) set to one inch, then a full light-year would be right about a mile total distance. Which would put our nearest neighboring star at about 4.5 miles distance.

Yeah, space is BIG.

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