How Far Away is the Moon? (The Scale of the Universe)

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·Nov 10, 2024

This is uh representing the earth. And this represents, what do you think? The moon? Yes. Now our first challenge is how far apart are they? Like, roughly? Like, roughly, about that much? Okay. Uh... I guess maybe about that far? Maybe? About that far? Yeah, yeah, maybe. Roughly? Okay. About like that? I'm guessing. Yeah, this far, but then it's like here somewhere, rough, right there and still. All right, let's let's say stand here. Ok, tonight. Yeah, yeah, great scene with panels in here.

Ok, these are some images I found on a Google image search for the Earth and the moon. Diagrams that are not to scale are pretty common, and I understand why we make them, so you can show the detail without showing all that uninteresting space in between. But they can have a problematic effect on learning because they give people the wrong idea about the relative proximity of things.

Now if we want to talk about the distance between the Earth and the moon, yeah, it's actually about here. Think about this: it takes like one second to go from the Earth to the moon, takes eight minutes for light to travel to the Sun, and four years to go to our nearest star.

And then consider that there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and as far as we know, a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. The universe truly is bigger than we can imagine and certainly bigger than we can draw it to scale.

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How Far Away is the Moon? (The Scale of the Universe)

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