Visualizing how far we must travel to colonize a habitable planet.

[Kablooie]

Last edited Sun Feb 6, 2022, 03:39 AM - Edit history (5)

I was wondering how far we'd have to go to colonize another planet.
To visualize this I pictured the earth as being 1 millimeter in diameter, about the size of a grain of sand.
I placed the sun on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco and calculated the distances heading south from there.

At that scale the sun would be a little over 4 inches in diameter and the earth would be a grain of sand, orbiting 40 feet away.

Saturn would be about a football field away from the sun.
Uranus, 2 football fields away.
Neptune, 3 football fields away.

To escape the Solar System we have to pass through the Oort cloud which is a bubble of small, icy objects surrounding the solar system.
The cloud starts about 14 miles from the 4 inch sun which puts it somewhere in San Bruno, south of San Francisco. We go south hudreds of miles to Los Angeles and we are still in the Oort cloud. Further south to San Diego and stii in the cloud. Into Mexico, past Tijuana and many hundreds of miles more into we get to Durango around the middle of Mexico. Finally we are out of the influence of the 4 inch sun, 1700 miles to the north.

We would reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, and a possibly habitable planet, Proxima Centauri B, about a thousand miles more south in Mexico City.

The next habitable candidates would be three thousand miles further in Brazil. There are many possible candidates at this distance and continuing down South America into Antarctica.
To reach the farthest known possibly habitable planet you would have to continue down through Antarctica and travel around the globe until you reach Shanghai.

The nearest galaxy to our Milky Way would be the Canid Major Dwarf Galaxy, about the distance of Saturn from the earth at this scale.
The Andromeda Galaxy would nearly as far as Uranus.

Just something to think about.