I use my 50-foot hallway to remember my celestial insignificance

What else would you do with a long blank wall?

Whenever you see drawings of the solar system, the size and distance aren’t to scale. That always annoys me.

To be fair, it’s hard to draw them to scale because space is big.

But when we moved into a new apartment that had a one-sided 50-foot long hallway, I decided to use the opportunity to draw a picture of the solar system as it really is.

It is an unusually long hallway for a 2-bedroom apartment. Chalk it up to San Francisco’s long skinny lot sizes.

Putting the sun at one end and mars at the other, I collapsed 140 million miles of empty space down to 50 feet. At this scale:

• The earth is 32 feet from the sun, and the moon is 1 inch from the earth

• The sun is 3.7 inches in diameter

• Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Moon are all dots between .3-.9mm in width, which I dotted as best I could

  

  

  We're really out there

Now I start each morning walking the the 94 million miles from the Earth to the Sun, And remember that I am but a speck on a speck.