Kind: captions
Language: en
This is uh representing the earth.
Okay.
And this represents what do you think?
The moon.
Yes. Now uh our first uh 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. Hang on. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe.
Yeah. Roughly
about like that.
But yeah,
I don't know. Maybe that like this far.
My feeling is like here somewhere
rough right there.
All right. All right. Let's Let's uh
I'm just going to stand here.
Okay. Can I
Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
Seat in my pants and stand here.
Okay. 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
proximities of things. Now, if we want
to talk about the distance between the
Earth and the Moon, it's actually
about here.
Think about this. It takes light 1
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 100 billion stars in our
galaxy and as far as we know 100 billion
galaxies in the universe. So the
universe truly is bigger than we can
imagine and certainly bigger than we can
draw to scale.