The Problem With Scale

Scale. It’s an everyday thing. The speedometer in your car has a scale. You might look at the scale on a map to find out how far away something is. The truth is we use scale every waking moment without even realizing it. Our binocular vision combined with our advanced biological processing unit, or brain as we affectionately call it, allows us to compare the scale of everything we see. Even children can tell the difference between a small object that is close by or a large object that is further away.

We are very good at scale. Local scale that is. Because even outdoors the average horizon is no more than three miles away, so our eyesight and distance perception are focused towards being more accurate within that range. Eagles that soar thousands of feet in the air might have a horizon twenty miles away and so their sight is correspondingly better than ours. You could say that when compared to us they see things in a different scale. A bigger scale.

The problem is that due to our own sensory limitations we have great difficulty in visualizing dimensions or distances that fall outside our everyday experience. This is why when driving across a plain towards a distant mountain range we find it very hard to accurately estimate the remaining distance. It fools our sense of scale.

And it’s not just here on earth that we have problems visualizing scale. Take our home, the solar system. How many people can say that they truly understand how vast our solar system is? Not many? Ok, let’s try a thought experiment that might help.

Imagine a ten-pin bowling ball. Eight inches in diameter. This represents our sun. So lets place it at the far end of a bowling lane, right on the number one pin spot, in the middle of the lane.

Now where is the earth? In scale to our model sun? To answer this you will first need to visit a kitchen and extract one small peppercorn from a pepper grinder. Make sure it’s not a large one though. We don’t want our earth to be too big. Now, going back to our imaginary sun, how far away do you think the peppercorn should be? Half way down the lane? Just past the arrows? At the foul line perhaps?

The surprising answer is that you would need to walk backwards another eighteen feet, or six large paces, from the foul line.

Just think about that for a moment. A peppercorn seventy eight feet away! And in truth, as planets go, we are actually pretty close to the sun. If you wanted to put Pluto (a pinhead) into our scale model you would have to carry on walking for almost exactly a mile!

I hope this gives some idea of the vast scale of our solar system and the ratio of sizes and distances involved. In fact ratios are something else we seem to have a natural ability with. Maybe it’s because we have ten fingers, but everyone seems to understand something that is ten times bigger or ten times smaller.

Anyway, just for fun, let’s work out some interesting ratios. Ratios that everybody can understand.

First let’s work out the total volume of our solar system. To do this we need to take the average distance to Pluto (it’s orbit is not exactly circular) and use it to work out the volume of a sphere that would include all the planets. It comes to approximately 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles as it happens. Which is pretty big.

Now let’s work out how much of that volume is habitable to us humans. To do this we need to work out the volume contained in our breathable atmosphere. If we assume that we can inhabit a zone of the earths surface that extends from sea level to about three miles above it we can then work out the total volume we have to live in. First we need to work out the volume of the earth. To keep things simple we will use an average radius that ignores the bulge caused by the earths rotation. Taking this average radius of 3,960 miles gives us a volume of 260,120,256,445 cubic miles. So if we then add three miles to our radius we can work out the volume including our habitable atmosphere.Which comes to 260,711,886,824

So to work out our actual ‘living space’ we simply subtract one from the other. It comes to about 591,000,000 cubic miles.Which sounds like a lot. But remember that volume we worked out earlier? The volume of the solar system. The one with a two followed by twenty nine zeros…

So let’s have some fun and work out the percentage of our solar system that we can actually live in.To do this we divide our living space by the total volume of the solar system and then multiply the result by one hundred…Right now you’re probably expecting me to come up with an answer. But the truth is I can’t. The calculator on my computer just says 0.00! However Google will come to the rescue. Its web based calculator function can handle such vast numbers, but the result of this one is actually pretty small…

0.000000000000000000029%!

To put that in perspective, it means that less than one third of one million million millionth of one percent of our solar system is inhabitable. That’s a bit like saying all we have to live on is one grain of sand in the middle of the Sahara desert! It’s that small.

And it’s not like we can go anywhere else either. Our nearest neighborhood star is four light years away, or about twenty four trillion miles. And it has no habitable planets we know of. Even if it did, and we could travel at 10% of the speed of light, (or an amazing sixty seven million miles an hour) it would still take forty years to get there ! Even if we do find evidence of other earth-like planets it’s highly unlikely we would ever be able to get there because of the sheer distances involved. So here we are, stuck on the solid skin of an impossibly small speck of molten rock in the middle of an unimaginably vast universe with nowhere to go.

And the best bit?

We are destroying it. We poison its rivers, we pollute its atmosphere, we cut down its forests, we dump our most dangerous waste in its seas. And usually to make nothing more than a quick buck. Possibly because within our own limited human perception making a quick buck can seem like a pretty big deal?

But as I said in the beginning, it’s all about scale. And our real problem is that not enough people understand the true scale of the problem we face. It is both the biggest and smallest problem in our Universe. And just like the guy driving towards a distant mountain range, its scale fools us.

Or maybe we really are fools…?

Author: Paul Heywood
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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