Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 20, 2023

Because it’s all a simulation.

Check out string theory, then you’ll get an idea what small is (and feel big at the same time).

They look big from OUR scale. But from the scale of the solar system (much less the galaxy) they’re minuscule.

They would have needed even more space if Pluto was still considered a planet!

Relativity?

Fun fact: Suspended from the ceiling of the living room of a beautiful canal house in Franeker, is the oldest still working planetarium in the world. This accurately moving model of the solar system was built between 1774 and 1781 by the Frisian wool comber, Eise Eisinga. >

Because everyone lives their life from a first-person point of view.

It hasn’t. It has a life form using up its short lifetime for wars, religion and similar idiocies instead of having a good time. That life form will eventually vanish, and that was it.

Its only big problems for the tiny on the planet. The rest of the universe doesn’t notice any of it.

There is a video about it on NPR’s website. Add the domain to the front of this: sections/thetwo-way/2015/09/18/441400933/planets-transit-the-desert-in-7-mile-scale-model-of-the-solar-system

There’s a 1/38000000 scale model of the solar system in NSW – the sun is at Siding Springs Observatory, Earth is about a km and a half, and there are various representations of Pluto 200km or so away.

This reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot quote. It’s really worth a look after reading this strip.

When I look at the sky, which you have made, at the moon and the stars, which you set in their places—what are human beings, that you think of them; mere mortals, that you care for them?—-Psalm 8

Brilliant Cartooning, Art and dialog. Thanks again Jef.

We don’t know what they are dealing with on other marbles. Maybe those unidentified objects are refugees from their Cat’s Eye Shooters.

It has such big problems because we’re on it.

The Earth may be tiny, but too many people on it think they’re the center of the universe.

Sartre reacted to learning our place in the universe with existential dread. CS Lewis rejected modern cosmology because it was far too empty and boring. HP Lovecraft, well, we all know how he reacted to a naturalistic universe.

Problem is, far too many think this little blue dot is at the center and everything is all about us, when really, we’re very, very small and off to one side, effecting little or nothing.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien pointed out, many ‘problems’ are really situations. In fact, you might say that there are no ‘big problems’, only situations.

I always thot that the best way to do a true scale model of the solar system (in which the distances between the planets and the diameter of the planets themselves were on the same scale) would be on the median strip of interstate highways.

I read advice for a scale model in which the sun is a soccer ball and Earth is a BB or peppercorn (preferably with an index card so you don’t lose it). The distance from the ball to a pin for Pluto should be about a thousand yards.

I am always happy to see/hear children ask the deep questions. Unfortunately, during their later growing period so many other things of little value divert their interest until they become mired in minutia and the big questions languish.

“You are here.↘”

In sixth grade we had a model of the solar system hanging from the ceiling. It used two scales, one for the sizes of the sun and planets, and the other for the distances between the sun and planets.

If the scale for distance had been 1 inch = 1 million miles, the model would have stretched for 35 football fields. If I remember that correctly. Back then Jupiter only had 12 moons.

In the Book of Job, we are told man is born into trouble.

Space is big. REALLY big.

Far too many self centered, amoral people who don’t care that we actually all share this planet.

With the Earth the size of a typical/regular marble (1.3 cm), the sun (out to the visible photosphere) would be a ball/sphere with a diameter of about 4 ft. 8 in.

The Christian worldview is the best explanation for reality.

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-three million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea…

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Northern Maine’s solar system model:

https://www.mainesolarsystem.Com/

Sweden Solar System – World’s Biggest Scale Model! youtu.Be/WEDY4j3BE20?si=svsYlJGaBujg9fGH