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Old 02-28-2019, 08:37 PM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by luke strawwalker
Yep...

Years ago I did some math and made a scale model of the solar system based on a 12 inch schoolroom globe for the Earth. It's worth noting that the space shuttle, at that scale, never flew (or could fly) more than a little less than 1/2 inch away from that typical 12 inch globe. The furthest humans have ever been is 31 feet away to the Moon, which would be about a 4 inch ball... (softball, roughly). At that scale, Pluto is about 220 miles away. The Sun is only 2.2 miles away.

If we added Proxima Centauri to our model, it would be located ON THE PLANET MARS, in this same scale-- over 36 MILLION miles away...

Later! OL J R
I've read about and seen pictures of Solar System models designed to that scale, but not ones that brought in Proxima Centauri (those decreased the scale sizes to a large extent). At your scale, Alpha Centauri A & B would be 28,600 miles from Proxima Centauri, and Alpha Centauri A and B would be a maximum of 220 miles from each other (the minimum distance would be about that between Saturn and the Sun). Also:

It's amazing how many people don't realize that almost since the dawn of the Space Age, interstellar spaceflight has been possible. In "The Promise of Space" in 1968, Arthur C. Clarke described the 500-pound Jupiter probe study, which became Pioneers F (10), G (11), and the built-but-not-flown H (now hanging in the National Air & Space Museum, as Pioneer 10), and:

The proposal was to use Jupiter's gravity to [1] escape from the Solar System, [2] cancel out the probe's velocity so that it would fall into the Sun, and [3] travel far above or below (north or south of) the ecliptic. Pioneer 10 flew mission type [1], mission type [2] wasn't flown, and Pioneer 11 flew a modified mission type [3], passing north of the ecliptic--but not above the Sun's north pole--and then flying by Saturn as it passed back down through the ecliptic. The NASA Ames Research Center tried to fly Pioneer H (which would have become Pioneer 12, following a successful launch) on a "full" out-of-ecliptic mission, above one or both of the Sun's poles after a Jupiter flyby, but that silicon-scaled, winged monstrosity had already begun to consume much of the NASA budget, so Pioneer H is today a stand-in for Pioneer 10 at the NASM, at zero ecliptic latitude. As well:

Clarke wrote (regarding these missions): "Space is full of subtleties and surprises. It is hard to believe that the rocket that put John Glenn into orbit could also serve to send a payload to the Sun--or to Proxima Centauri." Most people will then object that the time factor is prohibitive, but it really isn't. The "time barrier" isn't based on physics or even engineering, but purely on biology, and only human biology. To beings who are immortal (and even on Earth, amoebae--and possibly certain jellyfish--are immortal), or even "just" very long-lived, the universe--and especially interstellar distances--wouldn't seem very large at all. But even all-too-mortal human beings may be able to become effectively immortal, by utilizing technology that was foreseeable in the 1960s:

In their 1966 book, "Intelligent Life in the Universe," Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovsky described a method by which suspended animation might be achieved by starship crews. At a pressure of 3,000 atmospheres, water ice becomes Ice II, whose volume is almost exactly to that of an equal mass of *liquid* water at normal ambient Earth-surface conditions. This may enable human beings to be frozen indefinitely, thawed, and resuscitated without damage to their cellular structures. The crew's living quarters could be slowly raised to 3,000 atm. before the freezing process, and slowly lowered to 1 atm. afterward, with the partial-pressure mixture of atmospheric gases (nitrogen/oxygen, or possibly helium/oxygen) being varied as needed during the pressure changes.
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