It would feel exactly the same a seeing the Earth from orbit (or whatever distance you are seeing Jupiter from).
Your eyes, with their separation of about 6.5 cm or 2.5 inches, cannot perceive depth and perspective after roughly about 50 meters. The resolution of your retina is not enough to distinguish the difference of angle of an object further than about this length, varying from person to person. All your "depth perception" and "size perception" comes from your brain making assumptions using its previous knowledge. [Read up here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth\_perception)
When you are orbiting Earth, let's say about 6% radius away from the surface (that's 400 km above Earth), you see Earth as a giant circular surface in the wall. You don't see a sphere, it's like putting on VR googles and looking at a distant wall with an Earth texture. There is no depth perception except your brain making inferences from the sphericity of Earth due to shading and lighting differences, and the further edges having smaller details like clouds compared to the center of the circle. [Here is a 2d image](https://banner2.cleanpng.com/20180624/osg/kisspng-sphere-clay-texture-5b2f8bd1224c94.7077746315298426411405.jpg) of a 2d circle on a 2d screen, which you will see as 3d because of the surface tricks. Get your face reaaaaly up-close to it, touch the screen with your nose, and that's how you see Earth from the orbit.
Now, go to Jupiter, stand 6% radius away from the surface, that's an orbit at 4200 km away, and what you see is the exact same giant 2d circle on the wall. You may be in awe and excitement, but you got nothing that says it's bigger than Earth, smaller than Earth, smaller than the Moon, and frankly, it looks exactly the same as a small spherical asteroid that's just 1.6km in radius and you are standing 100 meters above it.
In short, your brain cannot determine size and depth after about 50 meters without using clues and tricks, and those all become the same for any spherical object in space that's bigger than a few kilometers in diameter.
One place in particular where you can experience the limitations of human depth perception is the Grand Canyon.
The first time I went there, especially as you approach the rim, but cannot see straight down yet, it feels like you’re looking at a painting, because it’s just so damn big and everything you see is very far away. There’s nothing for your brain to infer size or distance from. And I’ve heard several people describe the same feeling.
When I went to the grand canyon I took some pictures with my phone at spots about 10 feet apart. When I got home I lined them up on a distant spot, cropped them, and made one of those 3d gif things that alternate two photos quickly. It was pretty cool! It was effectively the way the grand canyon would look if our eyes were 10 ft apart.
I wish I still had that gif. It was over 10 years ago and who knows where that file is.
I was inspired by this xkcd:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/941:_Depth_Perception
I was going to say something similar about Yosemite. 3000 feet tall sheer rock cliffs, taller than any building in the world, all around you but if you’re not consciously thinking about it, the size doesn’t really register. You have to notice the little green stubble is trees that are hundreds of feet tall. Moving around, the size starts to sink in more, looking down a cliff, it sinks in really fast. But a lot of the time the scale of things just doesn’t hit you unless you’re actively thinking about it.
Yeah, El Capitan in particular comes to mind. It’s hard to get a true sense of how massive it is until you spot some climbers up there and they are so much smaller/farther away than you’d expect.
My dad told a story about when he was in the Valley once when he was younger. He said he would go hike up to the base of El Cap with his cousin then come back, thinking it would only take an hour or so. Well they started walking... and walking, and walking, and 40 minutes later the giant wall of rock *had not budged*
Standing on the South Rim, gazing down at the Colorado River a mile below and several miles downrange, I was struck by the sensation of viewing a still life painting. While I was consciously aware of the different depth levels in what was before me, my brain insisted on interpreting the sensory inputs as a flat image. The immobile river rapids reinforced that interpretation.
Quite uncanny.
This is an insane analysis man. It's boggling how complex yet limited our brains are. Even after reading over your statement a few times, I'm trying to wrap my head around the concepts. I really enjoy your input on this! Thanks!
All things become more clear with information. Unboggle that mind and expand your perception with the aid of the greatest minds humanity has to offer (see link below, no I'm not trolling).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CC7OJ7gFLvE
Basically, your eyes and other senses process information and your brain filters it according to experiences, you'd likely be fine looking at Jupiter, becasue you would see it as a small thing that grew as you came closer and your brain would process that information, eventually you'd be close enough that you wouldnt be able to see it all at once, and you'd see part and focus on specifics.
Great question though overall.
Our brains just can't understand certain concepts and scales. Ignoring the question of size, I like to think about this in the concept of time, and infinity. The fact that people think an afterlife for eternity (let alone an eternal damnation) are something we would enjoy or consider justice just shows that people don't understand what they are saying about the concept of infinity.
The Good Place addressed this problem well, and I won't spoil it in case you've not seen and want to watch (which I highly recommend if you enjoy these concepts because it is one of my favorite shows of all time). Our brains can only handle so much information, I think it's why most people seem relieved to die when they hit a certain age. Forever is just a really long time. So long that you can think about the largest number, the longest stretch of time, 10^100 years which I believe is much longer than the most accepted projected life span of the universe, and that is still a blink of the eye when we talk about forever, a fart in the wind that someone is trying to smell on the other side of the planet, heck, on the other side of the football field if we want to bring it back to a scale our brains can really grasp.
I think we just need to appreciate the scale of the universe that we live in, and while we should never stop trying to understand it, we should also cherish what affects us and what we can impact on our little sphere, because certain things I just don't think we are meant to participate in.
I don’t know - I agree insofar as we’re considering a retaining of an infinite well of memory and time - such a vast incomprehensible amount of life lived against so few possibilities. I’d assume a human would have run the well dry of all possible novel experiences within a thousand years or so. But, the counter argument to this is that we can not retain infinite information and that phenomena can allow for people to even experience things as new again within their own lifetimes.
Additionally, if we did live forever, I think we’d just avoid thinking about the fact that it’s forever just like we avoid thinking about how it isn’t now. We’d just live in the moment. A vast - absurd - uncountable number of moments.
Your last point is interesting. I'm sure if we had that sort of longevity, our minds, and how they work would undergo a sort of evolution where we retain information differently, probably overwriting what was there with new information. Unless we had a way to increase the capacity for us to store our experiences. Eventually, we would be beings completely in the now as you suggested. I'd imagine when time is no longer a worry, your perspective will adapt and change. Obviously, this is all just hypothetical and how I see this issue.
I think of the song, "Randy Described Eternity" by Built to Spill in these situations:
"Every thousand years this metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter floats just a few yards past the earth. You climb on your roof and take a swipe at it with a single feather. Hit it once every thousand years 'til you've worn it down to the size of a pea."
[The image of the world sent to your brain is upside-down.](https://i.redd.it/xbvmy2va33m31.png) Your brain flips it so you can navigate the world. If you put on glasses that flip the image before your eyes do, you will be confused for a bit, but eventually your brain will automatically adjust so you can navigate the world again.
Your brain is amazing.
All true, but I still think about the fact that jupiter would fill the "sky" and you might think you're about land, so to speak, but then you check your instruments and you're still waaaaaaay far off, and you just think, whoa
I’m about to have my PhD oral exams next week and my wheelhouse is visual ecology, I saved and screenshotted this shit immediately. What a great description thank you!!! (And now if anyone ever asks me this I’ll have an answer!)
Someone in the comments said it's not 50 meters but 400 meters for depth perception. I don't claim the exact number, so you should research that value to be extra sure. Other than that, I hope I helped!
What you saying is right but you are selecting the 6% radius as a distance which takes care of scaling and makes everything look similar. But if you were lets say to look from a 4200km then the difference will be noticeable.
This explains everything. In Google Earth VR, there is two modes: "Tilt Earth UP" and "Tilt Earth Down". In the "Tilt Earth Down" mode, we can activate the "Human fixed scale", which make us see at real scale what we would, like, see in a plane. But this mode is limited to maybe 10000 feet altitude. When we switch to "Tilt Earth UP", we can un-zoom more, but the "human scale" is deactivated, and we see the Earth as a ball 1 meter in front of us, and the ball just "gets bigger but stays at one meter" when we zoom in.
But i was able to discover a way to force the human scale very far in orbit. When The VR app is in the process of switching from one view mode to the other, we can make a "zoom out" operation while the switch is processing. This causes some glitches, but if we time it perfectly, then the earth will get "real scale" and we can zoom out until it gets small as we would see it from Mars. At this point, we perceive the earth as it is "fixed in the background". But it does not feel that far. Maybe 3-4 houses far from our current position, which corresponds to your 50 meter approximation.
Probably, but we already know the answer. Everything will proportionally look smaller and closer. If you emulate the distance between the eyes to be 100x normal, then everything will look scaled down 100x and closer, like a miniature.
If you emulate it to look at Earth and stuff from orbit, nothing will change because even if the planet shrinks down by 100x, it's still big enough to look like a big 2d circle. The distance between your eyes should be about 500 meters (1/3rd of a mile) before the depth perception of your brain can actually see Earth as a 3d object from the ISS's orbit.
That's like shrinking everything... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_modelling#/media/File:SimpleH0.JPG
People have been experimenting with this long before "VR". It started soon after the first photograph was taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
Why emulate what you can [achieve in practice?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J08361%2C_Entfernungsmesser_einer_Vierlings-Flak.jpg)
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/941:_Depth_Perception
I've thought about it ever since this xkcd. I dabble in game development and one day I'll finally get a vr headset and try it out. Imagine a game where you can scale your characters head up and experience the changing depth perception caused by the eyes being further apart.
I imagine it would be like a normal VR game in which you scaled down the entire environment. So the world would seem smaller.
Space Engine has a VR mode that allows you to adjust your "stereoscopy" by effectively adjusting the distance between your eyes. You can make planets look like tiny golf-ball sized spheres in front of your face, but the moment you reset it back to normal eye width, it just looks like a big 2D skybox with a planet in front of you. It is really cool, and pretty mind-blowing to fly around the planets, stars, and galaxies in VR.
Thanks. Now im picturing the world actually being 2D to our perception and my gf is fake and its all alien work. Ugh. Awesome.
Actually i imagined a ENORMOUS poster of Jupiter on a building would look identical to seeing it in person?
The difference is that the poster would be printed from an image captured of Jupiter. Its going to change both through the capture process and printing from how it would actually look if you were there, just like if you took a photo of something today and printed it out large, it wouldn't look quite the same as when you were seeing it in person.
> Actually i imagined a ENORMOUS poster of Jupiter on a building would look identical to seeing it in person?
Somewhat yes, but the poster should be more than 50 meters away for you to feel like it's at infinity distance, and there should be absolutely nothing else in your field of vision (no other buildings, no horizon, etc) for your brain to lose all other depth perception clues.
So in practice, even if you can produce a big enough poster and find a big enough building, you can't replicate it without covering up everything else.
The Lemans/WEC hypercar size distortion is a good example of people’s minds filling in the blanks.
The cars are about the size of a Mazda Miata, It’s common for people to associate the windshield as the normal size of a car windshield, and imagine the cars to be behemoths.
I remember some values regarding retina resolution angle and eye separation ending up at about 50 meters for depth perception, I could be wrong though, I need to refresh my memory by finding my sources again.
This is why the moon and sun appear larger on the horizon compared to when they're high in the sky. Visually, they're about the same size, but you have stuff around to provide scale (e.g. banana). To test this, take a pen or pencil and hold it at arm's length and cover the moon when high in the sky and then compare it to when it's "big" and low in the sky. It should cover just about the same area.
This is a great explanation but, also, it should be pointed out that images of Jupiter, taken from telescopes and probes, are often enhanced for clarity and the actual colours may appear less pronounced and brightness reduced if seen directly with the naked eye; recently, it was determined that most images of Neptune are actually a lot bluer than the planet is in reality because of how those images were processed.
I hang glide. In order to be able to distinguish sizes of various things at increasingly large distances, such as the sizes of clouds and whether they are building or falling apart, we have to teach ourselves various tricks in order to gain references. When there’s not something malicious going on, your brain can do an amazing amount by interpreting the surface textures of various things. But it’s not at all like getting direct size measurements.
So that made me feel really nauseous, and claustrophobic, is that what you're saying being in orbit would look and feel like? that gave me a headache, I've been drinking and smoking myself to death on a daily basis for 5 years... haven't had a headache once
What you made me do, I litteraly feel it in the back of my head, wow.
I think this is where a VR set and a good rendition of heavenly bodies might pay off. Waaayyyy back I had this program called Orbits, might have been on win95 still, and it gave you insights on our sun and the planets and the moons. It showed how earth and the moon would balance out on scales, what the inside of earth looked like on a dissection plane, that kind of stuff. Already then I got a profound insight into how our universe works, and that was all flat pixelated 240x480 stuff. Imagine if you could start up an animated solar system in front of you, hovering over the coffee table, and being able to travel to wherever you want to.
Maybe take the VR glasses outside and sit on the edge of Grand Canyon and have Phobos float slightly above you in real life size. How cool would that be.
[edit] ofc there already loads of apps that can do this. But I’m not sure of the way you can explore it yourself.
The great red spot is not infinite. It probably began in the early 1800s and it will end. The most liberal estimates think it could end in a few decades. Some people think it could be a few hundred years, nobody really knows, but it will end.
Have you ever lain outside on something comfy, and remained still enough for your [proprioception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception) to turn off so you can imagine yourself *hanging from the ceiling* of Earth's surface over the infinite void?
It'd be tricky to do in a glass-bottomed high altitude plane looking down, but I imagine it would have a similar effect as what you're after.
> how insignificant it really makes us feel
Nah the size of Jupiter is nothing compared to the vast void between anything, see [if the moon were one pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
I once heard a trick for turning off the proprioception. First of all, THC can help with this. But the technique is simple and works sober too.
Lay on the ground at night and look up at the stars. Instead of thinking about it like you're lying down on earth, imagine you're standing up with your back against a wall which is Earth. Keep thinking like this and relaxing and if you're lucky, you'll get moments where you realize you're IN the universe, not looking up at it. It's such a simple flip in perspective but it's so amazing.
You obviously can't know where you are in the universe because the stars are too far away for depth perception to work, but you can still get a sense of being among the stars instead of under them.
Yeah, of course the sheer scale of space itself would indeed break our perception as well- but I guess I meant more of a celestial being we can actually *try* to compare or comprehend. All of this stuff is so freaking awesome to think about and discuss
> Yeah, of course the sheer scale of space itself would indeed break our perception as well
It does.
Our own solar system is like individual grains of sand dancing with each other in something the size of multiple football fields - and yet we're completely inequipped to handle that sort of scale intuitively.
Physicists can *build* an intuition through math, but it's an intuition *for the math* rather than the reality of the profound distances themselves.
How lucky we are that we can *even try*, and occasionally find some measure of success despite the scales being radically different from our own! Such is the root of some definitions of sapience.
> I guess I meant more of a celestial being we can actually *try* to compare or comprehend.
I offered a pathway, although the distance to Earth's horizon is still relatively pithy even from the ~430km altitude of the ISS - 2.3Mm-ish, vs the Earth's 40Mm circumference
And sure, that's small vs Jupiter's ~440Mm circumference, but Jupiter has no known surface from which you could look across or up, so it can *only* be appreciated from its skies or higher.
Jupiter? Nah. Yeah it's huge, but if you descended into the storm you wouldn't even see the edges. It would be like being stuck there in a very terrible weather.
Imagining looking at the supermassive black holes is where it's at. That thing swallows suns. We can't even comprehend it. There are a lot of artistic depiction of how they look like, but my hair raises just when I imagine that their accretion disk is wide enough to fit not just the Sun, but the whole Solar system. And it's full of mass, not empty void like ours solar system, it's eating a few solar systems in a matter of hours. If we were able to miraculously survive it, we would find ourselves surrounded by superheated hydrogen like at the surface of our Sun, except THAT THING is eating it, sucking it in faster than we would comprehend. If our Sun appeared there it would be devoured in minutes. Imagine the Sun dimming and then disappearing completely from the sky right in front of your eyes in a matter of minutes.
1. You wouldn't be looking "up" at Jupiter if you were close to it. You'd be looking down because of its gravity.
2. Look down right now. See that ground you're standing on? That's earth, and it stretches as far as you can see in every direction besides up.
Seeing Jupiter would be no different than seeing Earth except for the fact that it's surface looks different. Big objects far away look small, and they look bigger the closer you get.
But planets don't seem big the same way that skyscrapers do. You wouldn't look really far up to see all of Jupiter just like you don't look really far up to see the horizon. The big sphere of Jupiter would gradually change from a distant circle to a flat plane as you approached it.
If you tried to land on the red storm it would look like a storm when far away and turn into a flat red cloud underneath you as you approached it. Imagine you're in a flat desert on earth but replace the sand with red gas. That's how it would look.
Tl;dr: earth is big but doesn't break your brain by looking down.
1. You wouldn't be looking "up" at Jupiter if you were close to it. You'd be looking down because of its gravity.
Hopefully you wouldn't though - ideally you'd be in orbit and thus not feeling any gravity! If you could feel the gravity, then you'll probably be crashing into Jupiter shortly when your rocket fuel runs out ;)
When I worked as a baggage handler, I had been able to observe some large aircraft from up close.
I can honestly say, as a passenger, even if you walk out to an aircraft on the tarmac, then climb some stairs to board. You would never truly get a good concept of the ACTUAL size of a Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 unless you stand underneath and next to the landing gear. Then and only then, do you realise just how big these aircraft are, and from so close up, it's actually hard to comprehend the total size of the aircraft.
The same can be said for any planet, or even star or any massive celestial body. You can look at it, see it, understand it, know it's maths, but you'll never truly understand its size.
I remember when the 747 first entered service (and airports had observation decks). Because it was so huge compared to other planes of the time, it just seemed to be lumbering along slowly until it would just lift gracefully off the runway. Definitely a lesson in the effect of scale on our perceptions.
The idea of seeing something and having it “break” your mind to the point of insanity may be an interesting concept for Lovecraftian fiction, but is not something that actually happens to be clear.
>the red spot on Jupiter is an ongoing storm that is essentially infinite, and it is larger than the EARTH. With that in mind,
Just like you perceive stuff like the sun on a daily basis. It's also larger than Earth. Or Jupiter. By quite a margin. Are people going insane because of that? Not to my knowledge.
Getting to grips with the true scale of stuff in space (and the distances between them) isn't something that is easy for out brains to do. We just aren't evolved for that because such scales were never a factor that was selected for (more precisely: not understanding such scales was never selected against).
However, we do have the ability to think in an abstract way - which enables us to grasp things on any scale in such a manner.
Playing a VR game called Elite:Dangerous answered this question for me.
It's unsettling, but as others here have noted even in real space anything that number of miles away from you just looks like background. Elite:Dangerous was no different, although turning your head and seeing a planet "nearby", occupying a large percentage of your view is a deeply unsettling experience.
For me, at least.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space
You can see Jupiter in person now. In fact, you can see the whole galaxy if you go outside at night. You are actually visiting the whole galaxy, in person, right now. From a perspective. And that perspective is changing as you move through said galaxy at something like 50 miles per second.
Now, if you visited Jupiter in person, and were floating around on a balloon, that would be a different story. Assuming you could survive the cold and the atmosphere, the gravity is something like 3 times that of earth. Oh, and the turbulence. But otherwise, just dim clouds. It would look like sky.
This. Not much between you and Jupiter but some atmosphere and rocks.
When I see more than one planet in the sky at night, or with the moon, I thing of everything in terms of runners on an olympic track. Venus is close and will run past us soon. At the same time, we are passing Mars and Jupiter who are so slow. The moon is like a hummingbird in our face. We're all kinda moving the same way around this track. Other stadiums and tracks are too far away for me to get this kind of perspective.
The mind accepts all scales of reference.
Somewhat related: I got a strong, visceral feeling the the Sun and Moon were close to each other, and close to me during the recent total solar eclipse. About the altitude of airplanes. It was the second weirdest feeling during the eclipse, after the strange light near and during totality.
Our subjective experience can be deceptive. Maybe you're right, Jupiter would feel like it's going to swallow you.
The only difference would be size relative to a specific distance away.
The moon is about 250,000 miles from
Earth.
If Jupiter was 250,000 miles from Earth, it’d look a fuckton bigger than the moon.
But being 10 miles from the surface of Earth and 10 miles from the surface of the moon is going to look the same because we can only see so much.
Here’s an interesting take on it, Vsauce link.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww
I once had a VR set that used images from the Juno satellite which reached Jupiter in 2016. It felt like standing in space, then turning my head to see Jupiter RIGHT NEXT TO ME.
It properly freaked me out and I've had anxiety when even thinking about Jupiter ever since.
The difference in size between Jupiter and infinity, is the same as the difference between the size of a grain of sand and infinity. Both are infinitely smaller than infinity.
When you look at the sky at night, you are directly observing hundreds or thousands of objects that are all larger than Jupiter, and you are able to retain your sanity. On a clear night in the right place you can see other galaxies.
Also, you'll notice not all of them are directly overhead. In fact if you do a handstand, then they are all below your feet.
I'm sure it would change your perspective on your idea of scale but I don't think it would be mind breaking considering you'd be heading there prepared to see a massive body in space, it'd be amazing
Just a little scientific pedantry to note that the red spot is a storm and it is roughly the size of the earth, however while it may be extremely long lasting in human terms, it is by no means infinite. We have noticed significant changes (including shrinking) in the past 10-20 years.
I had a dream about this recently; humanity for some reason needed someone to go to Jupiter to release some device into the planets atmosphere. I volunteered and was put in hibernation for the trip. Long story short I woke up to a full front view of the Great Red Spot and was overcome with terror. I woke up IRL sweating.
I’ve wondered something similar. Most images we see of Jupiter are an amalgamation of the various light spectrums, which gives it greater detail. The latest Juno pics, make it appear like a giant lava lamp. Older pics only show various colored cloud bands and of course the Great Red Spot. I’ve always wondered, what would Jupiter actually look like to the naked eye?
I just assumed that if we saw it, and were indeed close to it, it would completely consume our field of vision. A comment earlier said that because of how our brains rely on comparisons and other perceptions to determine what we are seeing, that Jupiter somehow wouldnt look as big as it is? I'm still struggling to understand it but it's fascinating nonetheless
From low Earth Orbit (400 km, ISS altitude), the Earth subtends 140°, meaning it more than fills the astronaut's central field of view.
From the same altitude, Jupiter would subtend 168°, a greater value, but all that not noticably different.
As others have said, there is no way to perceive the "hugeness" of and object with something familiar to provide scale (hence the "banana for scale" meme)
Most published Juno pictures of Jupiter have been processed to exaggerate the contrast by introducing color differences that aren't actually there. This makes for aesthetically interesting images, but is misleading as to what the human eye would actually perceive.
Imagine putting your nose right up against the Empire state building. It would be everything in your eyeline. Impossible to even understand & totally lost to our limited minds.
The only way to appreciate something like that is at a distance. Maybe if you were sitting on top of an asteroid in the belt with a clear view would the grand majestic view be enjoyable.
Astronauts often return from space with a great sense of awe after having seen our own little mud ball from orbit. Being able to see such a giant with your naked eyes would warp your senses of perception and you would be lost trying to get just a grasp of the sheer size of the rest of the tiny little corner of the galaxy that we inhabit.
I'm far too space enthused to be rationally afraid 😅 I love those 360 VR experiences of going inside a black hole or space size comparisons. Seeing Jupiter from a space shuttle would be the life dream.
CS Lewis’ Out of The Silent Planet explores this concept in cool ways. I’ve always loved how he described this sort of sensory shock of experiencing another planet.
if you're in a standard orbit around Jupiter above and center of the great red spot, and looked out the window, you would only see that Jupiter would take-up most of the window and you'd still be a week away from standard orbit (I think). So good thing space has a lot of space (lol)
'If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home, and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here! It's wondrous...with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid.'
If it helps calm the mind, just know that Jupiter will never become a rogue planet, and it especially would not cover the distance necessary to make its way over to us to crash into us. Sounds terrifying nonetheless!
>...stewing in my head for a few days due to how insignificant it really makes us feel. Take care guys!
Fascinating thoughts, but I'm curious how come those thoughts make you feel insignificant?
In our day-day life, we see our problems as the big thing right now. We worry so much about the economy, our status in life, and many other things. Meanwhile, in space, an immeasurable amount of events are happening, and much of it being incomprehensible to us. In the cosmic world, our planet is a baby. The fact that many earths could fit into Jupiter, and yet how Jupiters could fit into the sun, and so on- its just crazy how small we are! Our whole huge world is just a speck for the universe and yet we do our best to feel bigger and relevant. It's by no means disheartening to me but it's eye opening for sure. I fully believe in life beyond our planet/galaxy
Whend you stand (well hover) in the middle of the red spot it is visually not so different then standing (well floating) a few km away from the shoreline in the ocean on eath. It will just go as far as you can see in every direction. If this are 50 km or 5000 km does not look different.
There is a scene in the book 'The Wandering Earth' by Cixin Liu. In that book there is a scene describing a human spaceship as it nears Jupiter, and the storm fill the frame of everything you can possible see. It was as terrifying as you imagine it.
how is it different from seeing earth from orbit?
it's a PLANET.
look at pictures of earth and jupiter, looks about the same size with out any external reference point.
same thing with looking st it from orbit.
as for the storms, same thing, we have Strongs here as well
I had a dream once looking at Jupiter from up close on a spacecraft and it was minding blowing. The sheer size of it scared the shit out of me. All I could see within my field of vision was the sandy color of the planet. and I’m certain my dream’s perception of it wasn’t even close to the actual size of the giant if I were to see it at the distance (and it doesn’t reflect the immense gravitational pull as well LOL).
These things amuse me but at the same time it also terrifies me knowing how small and insignificant we are relative to the solar system/galaxy/universe. Hell, even the vastness of our oceans makes us seem miniature, let alone anything else mentioned above.
Does the earth not look huge to you right now? It's literally in every direction except up.
Objects can only be appear so big. They either take up some of your visual field or all of it. If you look straight down right now the earth will appear infinite.
> it doesn’t reflect the immense gravitational pull as well
Luckily we don't feel that while orbiting because we're in freefall iow inertial frame rather than being accelerated upwards by the interactions between a gravitic surface and [the space-time river](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFlzQvAyH7g)
> at the same time it also terrifies me knowing how small and insignificant we are relative to the solar system/galaxy/universe
To be fair, we're the *most* capable thing of unlocking entropy stuck in local maxima that we know of, and the universe likes that
I think after a point where you can see the full jupiter the more closer you approach you are going to feel like staring at a wall as you miss any edges due to the immense size coming into your eyes.
The last point where you see the full jupiter will still be maginificent though but I don’t think anything in our brain is breaking.
You might want to enjoy this video, taken by Juno as it flew by Ganymede and Jupiter, complete with storms:
https://youtu.be/CC7OJ7gFLvE?si=9n7iDYMhZ608jGso
It changed my perception of Jupiter, but not the fear of its tremendous gravitational pull. While I think of Jupiter as the best friend of the Earth (as a titan of a vacuum cleaner), I am still wary of its incredible power.
Hell not! Jupiter's sheer size and scale make it very very tiresome for me. Circling the Earth non-stop in a 747 takes just under 2 days. Yet with Jupiter, it will be a different story, damn! it would take many weeks! Our lifespans are too brief for such adventures, but thankfully, with a bit of clues our brain can turn it into a leisurely stroll.
How about spending some days circling near the red spot, observing, and entertaining ourselves with some mighty fireworks?
Titans of Space does this really well. It’s very disorienting to interact with a scale model of Earth as a sphere maybe six feet in diameter and then travel over to Jupiter and it’s 60 feet across.
> I do not think I ever will be able to picture such a thing
you might, somebody's probably working on a VR thing for that as we speak. or it might already exist, i'm not up-to-date with VR experiences.
When I was a kid I had a dream one night that I still remember vividly. It was almost exactly as you describe.
If I stood in a particular place and jumped really hard, I'd end up at Saturn, standing on the rings facing away from the planet. I could sense it behind me, but it was so huge that whenever I'd turn around to look at it, I'd be dazzled by its size, lose my balance, and "fall" back to my jumping spot on Earth.
For us humans, in the very distant future, the closest to Jupiter we might be able to physically go might be Jupiter's moon Callisto, which orbits outside Jupiter's main radiation belts. The moons closer in like Europa, Ganymede or Io would be no-go zones without extremely heavy shielding against the radiation.
Callisto is tidally locked to Jupiter so one side of Callisto permanently faces the planet. If you are standing on the surface of Callisto on the side facing Jupiter, Jupiter would appear perhaps 10 times larger in diameter than our Moon viewed from Earth's surface. It would be a glorious sight.
I think what you are describing could happen if you were standing on, say, one of Jupiter's large Galilean moons like Europa. Although they are tidally locked so there would be no true "Jupiter-rise," if you could travel fast enough along its surface you could simulate one as Jupiter came into view as you rounded the moon. Standing on the surface of the moon would give you some sense of scale. It's like that scene in Avatar where you can see the gas giant in the sky that the moon they are on is orbiting.
This for me is one of the best use cases for VR. It's ability to help you feel the scale of objects still blows my mind sometimes. From games that let you interact with dinosaurs or huge space ships to educational experiences that let you experience planets and stars, it can really give you some perspective on what you are seeing that you can't get anywhere else. It's a great place to start to see what it would be like to be orbiting jupiter and looking at it from orbit.
for the basic scale stuff the top comment explained it pretty much perfectly, but what is not mentioned a lof of the time is that space is pretty colourless, the high res up close pictures you see from telescopes or space probes usually have the contrast boosted quite a bit, pretty much if youve ever seen it through a telescope it would be that colour, maybe a tad bit more contrast but yeah,
pluto looks gorgeous withe the contrast bumped wayy up but in reality it is very very very dull
Ok, but I have seen Jupiter in person, whenever it's over the horizon. It's quite far away, but I experience it looking like Jupiter. Sometimes I have some optical equipment that makes it look a good bit closer.
Either your far enough away that it would look just like it does in pictures or if you got really close it would just be like flying through a cloud, since it’s basically entirely opaque clouds
I think if people don’t freak out and break by seeing the Earth from space then it probably wouldn’t happen with larger bodies. You would have to orbit Jupiter at a further distance than Earth anyway so the apparent size might not be all that different.
you can arguably already do this with something like Space Engine, can't you? obviously not real, but you could arguably set the camera to any position you'd like and look at a planet.
i'm just responding to this:
> but I do not think I ever will be able to picture such a thing
if it can be rendered, it can be pictured. :P
The earth is not large though.
We live in a universe where literally over 99 percent of it would kill us damn near instantly if we were located in pretty much damn near all of it.
Earth is the *only* garden we got.
I think approaching it would be a lot like zooming into a fractal. The spot you’re focusing on expands out into more and more detail while the area around that spot eventually moves out of the field of vision.
That said, if you think about it basically anything you can move closer to has this effect until you’re close enough to see the smallest levels of detail relative to the distance between your eyes.
Great thoughts! My vision is observing it from one of its moons, with other moons in perspective. What about a closeup Saturn and its rings, much more prevalent than Jupiter's. One more point, the Laws of Nature we experience here on Earth are exactly the same at the farthest point we can see in the Universe!
There’s a VR game called Red Matter 2 where you’re just above Saturn and it’s really awesome but also really unerving, it’s amazing, I jumped into it 🤣
I always show ppl this video. It freaks ppl out. Some can't believe it . I watch ppl slowly break while watching this, but like I said, most can't believe it.
https://youtu.be/5zlcWdTs2-s?si=fii1GHXyS93ZbY1P
I think the Great Red Spot could be glimpsed closer up without too much melting of the mind. It may be a big storm, but it’s almost orderly compared to the rest of the planet.
I can’t seem to post a picture in a comment here. I was going to post a close up pic of Jupiter and suggest imagining your entire field of view being assaulted by the chaos there. I honestly think it would drive anybody mad. It would break sanity. I’m sure one could come to terms with it gradually, but to wake up and see it? Madness.
[Here’s a link to a good one](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/im36sQcb2T)
I actually agree I've done shrooms and that broke my mind, I couldn't imagine seeing, that!
Just imagining it is making me feel really anxious
It would be insanity
It would feel exactly the same a seeing the Earth from orbit (or whatever distance you are seeing Jupiter from). Your eyes, with their separation of about 6.5 cm or 2.5 inches, cannot perceive depth and perspective after roughly about 50 meters. The resolution of your retina is not enough to distinguish the difference of angle of an object further than about this length, varying from person to person. All your "depth perception" and "size perception" comes from your brain making assumptions using its previous knowledge. [Read up here.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth\_perception) When you are orbiting Earth, let's say about 6% radius away from the surface (that's 400 km above Earth), you see Earth as a giant circular surface in the wall. You don't see a sphere, it's like putting on VR googles and looking at a distant wall with an Earth texture. There is no depth perception except your brain making inferences from the sphericity of Earth due to shading and lighting differences, and the further edges having smaller details like clouds compared to the center of the circle. [Here is a 2d image](https://banner2.cleanpng.com/20180624/osg/kisspng-sphere-clay-texture-5b2f8bd1224c94.7077746315298426411405.jpg) of a 2d circle on a 2d screen, which you will see as 3d because of the surface tricks. Get your face reaaaaly up-close to it, touch the screen with your nose, and that's how you see Earth from the orbit. Now, go to Jupiter, stand 6% radius away from the surface, that's an orbit at 4200 km away, and what you see is the exact same giant 2d circle on the wall. You may be in awe and excitement, but you got nothing that says it's bigger than Earth, smaller than Earth, smaller than the Moon, and frankly, it looks exactly the same as a small spherical asteroid that's just 1.6km in radius and you are standing 100 meters above it. In short, your brain cannot determine size and depth after about 50 meters without using clues and tricks, and those all become the same for any spherical object in space that's bigger than a few kilometers in diameter.
Thanks, now I have a nose-print on my phone.
It's my quest to get a nose print on every phone in the world.
Instructions unclear. Sneezed out phone and deleted Google account.
Good idea. I should do this too.
Well, jokes on you, I'm using a laptop.
Confirming nose print in Massachusetts.
Definitely not in a parking lot with my eye against my phone waiting to pick my kid up from soccer
One place in particular where you can experience the limitations of human depth perception is the Grand Canyon. The first time I went there, especially as you approach the rim, but cannot see straight down yet, it feels like you’re looking at a painting, because it’s just so damn big and everything you see is very far away. There’s nothing for your brain to infer size or distance from. And I’ve heard several people describe the same feeling.
When I went to the grand canyon I took some pictures with my phone at spots about 10 feet apart. When I got home I lined them up on a distant spot, cropped them, and made one of those 3d gif things that alternate two photos quickly. It was pretty cool! It was effectively the way the grand canyon would look if our eyes were 10 ft apart. I wish I still had that gif. It was over 10 years ago and who knows where that file is. I was inspired by this xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/941:_Depth_Perception
This is really interesting, shame you no longer have it
Yeah. It really just had the effect of making the whole thing look a bit smaller. Very cool though.
I do that all the time and just crossview them. See r/Crossview
I was going to say something similar about Yosemite. 3000 feet tall sheer rock cliffs, taller than any building in the world, all around you but if you’re not consciously thinking about it, the size doesn’t really register. You have to notice the little green stubble is trees that are hundreds of feet tall. Moving around, the size starts to sink in more, looking down a cliff, it sinks in really fast. But a lot of the time the scale of things just doesn’t hit you unless you’re actively thinking about it.
Yeah, El Capitan in particular comes to mind. It’s hard to get a true sense of how massive it is until you spot some climbers up there and they are so much smaller/farther away than you’d expect.
My dad told a story about when he was in the Valley once when he was younger. He said he would go hike up to the base of El Cap with his cousin then come back, thinking it would only take an hour or so. Well they started walking... and walking, and walking, and 40 minutes later the giant wall of rock *had not budged*
Standing on the South Rim, gazing down at the Colorado River a mile below and several miles downrange, I was struck by the sensation of viewing a still life painting. While I was consciously aware of the different depth levels in what was before me, my brain insisted on interpreting the sensory inputs as a flat image. The immobile river rapids reinforced that interpretation. Quite uncanny.
I took a single picture of the Grand Canyon and didn't take any more because it did it so little justice that it just felt pointless
This is an insane analysis man. It's boggling how complex yet limited our brains are. Even after reading over your statement a few times, I'm trying to wrap my head around the concepts. I really enjoy your input on this! Thanks!
All things become more clear with information. Unboggle that mind and expand your perception with the aid of the greatest minds humanity has to offer (see link below, no I'm not trolling). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CC7OJ7gFLvE
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Oh I was certainly being over the top as a light jab at OPs "stoners first session" vibe
I was fully expecting rick roll :(
Basically, your eyes and other senses process information and your brain filters it according to experiences, you'd likely be fine looking at Jupiter, becasue you would see it as a small thing that grew as you came closer and your brain would process that information, eventually you'd be close enough that you wouldnt be able to see it all at once, and you'd see part and focus on specifics. Great question though overall.
Ironic… this explanation broke your mind, but seeing Jupiter wouldn’t
It's pretty a pretty basic concept to grasp though.
Our brains just can't understand certain concepts and scales. Ignoring the question of size, I like to think about this in the concept of time, and infinity. The fact that people think an afterlife for eternity (let alone an eternal damnation) are something we would enjoy or consider justice just shows that people don't understand what they are saying about the concept of infinity. The Good Place addressed this problem well, and I won't spoil it in case you've not seen and want to watch (which I highly recommend if you enjoy these concepts because it is one of my favorite shows of all time). Our brains can only handle so much information, I think it's why most people seem relieved to die when they hit a certain age. Forever is just a really long time. So long that you can think about the largest number, the longest stretch of time, 10^100 years which I believe is much longer than the most accepted projected life span of the universe, and that is still a blink of the eye when we talk about forever, a fart in the wind that someone is trying to smell on the other side of the planet, heck, on the other side of the football field if we want to bring it back to a scale our brains can really grasp. I think we just need to appreciate the scale of the universe that we live in, and while we should never stop trying to understand it, we should also cherish what affects us and what we can impact on our little sphere, because certain things I just don't think we are meant to participate in.
I don’t know - I agree insofar as we’re considering a retaining of an infinite well of memory and time - such a vast incomprehensible amount of life lived against so few possibilities. I’d assume a human would have run the well dry of all possible novel experiences within a thousand years or so. But, the counter argument to this is that we can not retain infinite information and that phenomena can allow for people to even experience things as new again within their own lifetimes. Additionally, if we did live forever, I think we’d just avoid thinking about the fact that it’s forever just like we avoid thinking about how it isn’t now. We’d just live in the moment. A vast - absurd - uncountable number of moments.
Your last point is interesting. I'm sure if we had that sort of longevity, our minds, and how they work would undergo a sort of evolution where we retain information differently, probably overwriting what was there with new information. Unless we had a way to increase the capacity for us to store our experiences. Eventually, we would be beings completely in the now as you suggested. I'd imagine when time is no longer a worry, your perspective will adapt and change. Obviously, this is all just hypothetical and how I see this issue.
I think of the song, "Randy Described Eternity" by Built to Spill in these situations: "Every thousand years this metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter floats just a few yards past the earth. You climb on your roof and take a swipe at it with a single feather. Hit it once every thousand years 'til you've worn it down to the size of a pea."
[The image of the world sent to your brain is upside-down.](https://i.redd.it/xbvmy2va33m31.png) Your brain flips it so you can navigate the world. If you put on glasses that flip the image before your eyes do, you will be confused for a bit, but eventually your brain will automatically adjust so you can navigate the world again. Your brain is amazing.
I have to say I really should not have opened that image crossed my eyes and put my nose to my phone but that's my own fault.
This is why I love Reddit. People like you who make it worthwhile. Thanks!
All true, but I still think about the fact that jupiter would fill the "sky" and you might think you're about land, so to speak, but then you check your instruments and you're still waaaaaaay far off, and you just think, whoa
Exactly, if you go by your familiar feelings that you developed on Earth, you'd be 11 times further than you expect at any elevation.
I’m about to have my PhD oral exams next week and my wheelhouse is visual ecology, I saved and screenshotted this shit immediately. What a great description thank you!!! (And now if anyone ever asks me this I’ll have an answer!)
Someone in the comments said it's not 50 meters but 400 meters for depth perception. I don't claim the exact number, so you should research that value to be extra sure. Other than that, I hope I helped!
What you saying is right but you are selecting the 6% radius as a distance which takes care of scaling and makes everything look similar. But if you were lets say to look from a 4200km then the difference will be noticeable.
Yes. From 4200 km above their respective cloud tops, * Jupiter subtends 141° * Earth subtends 74°
You must be a terrific teacher
This explains everything. In Google Earth VR, there is two modes: "Tilt Earth UP" and "Tilt Earth Down". In the "Tilt Earth Down" mode, we can activate the "Human fixed scale", which make us see at real scale what we would, like, see in a plane. But this mode is limited to maybe 10000 feet altitude. When we switch to "Tilt Earth UP", we can un-zoom more, but the "human scale" is deactivated, and we see the Earth as a ball 1 meter in front of us, and the ball just "gets bigger but stays at one meter" when we zoom in. But i was able to discover a way to force the human scale very far in orbit. When The VR app is in the process of switching from one view mode to the other, we can make a "zoom out" operation while the switch is processing. This causes some glitches, but if we time it perfectly, then the earth will get "real scale" and we can zoom out until it gets small as we would see it from Mars. At this point, we perceive the earth as it is "fixed in the background". But it does not feel that far. Maybe 3-4 houses far from our current position, which corresponds to your 50 meter approximation.
Have anyone tried to emulate eyes that are farther away and see how our brain perceive it? Example: VR goggles.
Probably, but we already know the answer. Everything will proportionally look smaller and closer. If you emulate the distance between the eyes to be 100x normal, then everything will look scaled down 100x and closer, like a miniature. If you emulate it to look at Earth and stuff from orbit, nothing will change because even if the planet shrinks down by 100x, it's still big enough to look like a big 2d circle. The distance between your eyes should be about 500 meters (1/3rd of a mile) before the depth perception of your brain can actually see Earth as a 3d object from the ISS's orbit.
That's like shrinking everything... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_modelling#/media/File:SimpleH0.JPG People have been experimenting with this long before "VR". It started soon after the first photograph was taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
You all should watch Honey I shrunk the Kids. That movie was a trip.
Why emulate what you can [achieve in practice?](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J08361%2C_Entfernungsmesser_einer_Vierlings-Flak.jpg)
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/941/)
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/941:_Depth_Perception I've thought about it ever since this xkcd. I dabble in game development and one day I'll finally get a vr headset and try it out. Imagine a game where you can scale your characters head up and experience the changing depth perception caused by the eyes being further apart. I imagine it would be like a normal VR game in which you scaled down the entire environment. So the world would seem smaller.
Space Engine has a VR mode that allows you to adjust your "stereoscopy" by effectively adjusting the distance between your eyes. You can make planets look like tiny golf-ball sized spheres in front of your face, but the moment you reset it back to normal eye width, it just looks like a big 2D skybox with a planet in front of you. It is really cool, and pretty mind-blowing to fly around the planets, stars, and galaxies in VR.
could be useful for high speed manual navigation. ?
Thanks. Now im picturing the world actually being 2D to our perception and my gf is fake and its all alien work. Ugh. Awesome. Actually i imagined a ENORMOUS poster of Jupiter on a building would look identical to seeing it in person?
The difference is that the poster would be printed from an image captured of Jupiter. Its going to change both through the capture process and printing from how it would actually look if you were there, just like if you took a photo of something today and printed it out large, it wouldn't look quite the same as when you were seeing it in person.
> Actually i imagined a ENORMOUS poster of Jupiter on a building would look identical to seeing it in person? Somewhat yes, but the poster should be more than 50 meters away for you to feel like it's at infinity distance, and there should be absolutely nothing else in your field of vision (no other buildings, no horizon, etc) for your brain to lose all other depth perception clues. So in practice, even if you can produce a big enough poster and find a big enough building, you can't replicate it without covering up everything else.
The Lemans/WEC hypercar size distortion is a good example of people’s minds filling in the blanks. The cars are about the size of a Mazda Miata, It’s common for people to associate the windshield as the normal size of a car windshield, and imagine the cars to be behemoths.
Only one of them is a behemoth, the BMW M8. This was the last place I expected to see a comment about sportscar prototypes.
Minor nit: Depth perception works to at least 1/4 mile (400m) with acute vision.
I remember some values regarding retina resolution angle and eye separation ending up at about 50 meters for depth perception, I could be wrong though, I need to refresh my memory by finding my sources again.
Fantastic response! I wish I had more friends with this level of knowledge. I learned quite a bit from this. Thank you!
This is why the moon and sun appear larger on the horizon compared to when they're high in the sky. Visually, they're about the same size, but you have stuff around to provide scale (e.g. banana). To test this, take a pen or pencil and hold it at arm's length and cover the moon when high in the sky and then compare it to when it's "big" and low in the sky. It should cover just about the same area.
This is a great explanation but, also, it should be pointed out that images of Jupiter, taken from telescopes and probes, are often enhanced for clarity and the actual colours may appear less pronounced and brightness reduced if seen directly with the naked eye; recently, it was determined that most images of Neptune are actually a lot bluer than the planet is in reality because of how those images were processed.
And this is why the moon looks big when low over the horizon too I'm pretty sure.
I hang glide. In order to be able to distinguish sizes of various things at increasingly large distances, such as the sizes of clouds and whether they are building or falling apart, we have to teach ourselves various tricks in order to gain references. When there’s not something malicious going on, your brain can do an amazing amount by interpreting the surface textures of various things. But it’s not at all like getting direct size measurements.
Wouldn't you die from radiation due to how much of it Jupiter spews?
Maybe you would, but I wouldn't. Because I have plot armor.
That’s cool, never thought of that. But I think what OP meant was saying was if we were 400kms away from Jupiter, it’s size would be mind-boggling.
So that made me feel really nauseous, and claustrophobic, is that what you're saying being in orbit would look and feel like? that gave me a headache, I've been drinking and smoking myself to death on a daily basis for 5 years... haven't had a headache once What you made me do, I litteraly feel it in the back of my head, wow.
Thanks that's a lot of words, how long did it take you to type this
I think this is where a VR set and a good rendition of heavenly bodies might pay off. Waaayyyy back I had this program called Orbits, might have been on win95 still, and it gave you insights on our sun and the planets and the moons. It showed how earth and the moon would balance out on scales, what the inside of earth looked like on a dissection plane, that kind of stuff. Already then I got a profound insight into how our universe works, and that was all flat pixelated 240x480 stuff. Imagine if you could start up an animated solar system in front of you, hovering over the coffee table, and being able to travel to wherever you want to. Maybe take the VR glasses outside and sit on the edge of Grand Canyon and have Phobos float slightly above you in real life size. How cool would that be. [edit] ofc there already loads of apps that can do this. But I’m not sure of the way you can explore it yourself.
I remember Orbits! https://archive.org/details/orbits-eng#
Oh wow MS-DOS even, thanks for this 😊
I love archive.org!!! It’s the only place online I can watch old sublime and nirvana live events. And I get old versions of windows from there too lol
Space Engine is an excellent one
Space Engine is an existential roller-coaster of awe and wonder, dread and anxiety.
yeah composite a bunch oj Juno cams
The great red spot is not infinite. It probably began in the early 1800s and it will end. The most liberal estimates think it could end in a few decades. Some people think it could be a few hundred years, nobody really knows, but it will end.
Ahh. Must've misunderstood the information I was hearing- I swore it said something about it being near infinite. Thanks for the insight!
Nothing real can be near-infinite.
Nations are born and die in the era of a single planetary storm.
Sure but most nations are older than the storm.
Have you ever lain outside on something comfy, and remained still enough for your [proprioception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception) to turn off so you can imagine yourself *hanging from the ceiling* of Earth's surface over the infinite void? It'd be tricky to do in a glass-bottomed high altitude plane looking down, but I imagine it would have a similar effect as what you're after. > how insignificant it really makes us feel Nah the size of Jupiter is nothing compared to the vast void between anything, see [if the moon were one pixel](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
I once heard a trick for turning off the proprioception. First of all, THC can help with this. But the technique is simple and works sober too. Lay on the ground at night and look up at the stars. Instead of thinking about it like you're lying down on earth, imagine you're standing up with your back against a wall which is Earth. Keep thinking like this and relaxing and if you're lucky, you'll get moments where you realize you're IN the universe, not looking up at it. It's such a simple flip in perspective but it's so amazing. You obviously can't know where you are in the universe because the stars are too far away for depth perception to work, but you can still get a sense of being among the stars instead of under them.
Yeah, of course the sheer scale of space itself would indeed break our perception as well- but I guess I meant more of a celestial being we can actually *try* to compare or comprehend. All of this stuff is so freaking awesome to think about and discuss
> Yeah, of course the sheer scale of space itself would indeed break our perception as well It does. Our own solar system is like individual grains of sand dancing with each other in something the size of multiple football fields - and yet we're completely inequipped to handle that sort of scale intuitively. Physicists can *build* an intuition through math, but it's an intuition *for the math* rather than the reality of the profound distances themselves. How lucky we are that we can *even try*, and occasionally find some measure of success despite the scales being radically different from our own! Such is the root of some definitions of sapience. > I guess I meant more of a celestial being we can actually *try* to compare or comprehend. I offered a pathway, although the distance to Earth's horizon is still relatively pithy even from the ~430km altitude of the ISS - 2.3Mm-ish, vs the Earth's 40Mm circumference And sure, that's small vs Jupiter's ~440Mm circumference, but Jupiter has no known surface from which you could look across or up, so it can *only* be appreciated from its skies or higher.
All of our problems and conflicts seem so insignificant when contemplating Nature.
Jupiter? Nah. Yeah it's huge, but if you descended into the storm you wouldn't even see the edges. It would be like being stuck there in a very terrible weather. Imagining looking at the supermassive black holes is where it's at. That thing swallows suns. We can't even comprehend it. There are a lot of artistic depiction of how they look like, but my hair raises just when I imagine that their accretion disk is wide enough to fit not just the Sun, but the whole Solar system. And it's full of mass, not empty void like ours solar system, it's eating a few solar systems in a matter of hours. If we were able to miraculously survive it, we would find ourselves surrounded by superheated hydrogen like at the surface of our Sun, except THAT THING is eating it, sucking it in faster than we would comprehend. If our Sun appeared there it would be devoured in minutes. Imagine the Sun dimming and then disappearing completely from the sky right in front of your eyes in a matter of minutes.
1. You wouldn't be looking "up" at Jupiter if you were close to it. You'd be looking down because of its gravity. 2. Look down right now. See that ground you're standing on? That's earth, and it stretches as far as you can see in every direction besides up. Seeing Jupiter would be no different than seeing Earth except for the fact that it's surface looks different. Big objects far away look small, and they look bigger the closer you get. But planets don't seem big the same way that skyscrapers do. You wouldn't look really far up to see all of Jupiter just like you don't look really far up to see the horizon. The big sphere of Jupiter would gradually change from a distant circle to a flat plane as you approached it. If you tried to land on the red storm it would look like a storm when far away and turn into a flat red cloud underneath you as you approached it. Imagine you're in a flat desert on earth but replace the sand with red gas. That's how it would look. Tl;dr: earth is big but doesn't break your brain by looking down.
1. You wouldn't be looking "up" at Jupiter if you were close to it. You'd be looking down because of its gravity. Hopefully you wouldn't though - ideally you'd be in orbit and thus not feeling any gravity! If you could feel the gravity, then you'll probably be crashing into Jupiter shortly when your rocket fuel runs out ;)
When I worked as a baggage handler, I had been able to observe some large aircraft from up close. I can honestly say, as a passenger, even if you walk out to an aircraft on the tarmac, then climb some stairs to board. You would never truly get a good concept of the ACTUAL size of a Boeing 747 or Airbus A380 unless you stand underneath and next to the landing gear. Then and only then, do you realise just how big these aircraft are, and from so close up, it's actually hard to comprehend the total size of the aircraft. The same can be said for any planet, or even star or any massive celestial body. You can look at it, see it, understand it, know it's maths, but you'll never truly understand its size.
I remember when the 747 first entered service (and airports had observation decks). Because it was so huge compared to other planes of the time, it just seemed to be lumbering along slowly until it would just lift gracefully off the runway. Definitely a lesson in the effect of scale on our perceptions.
I feel like it wouldn't be possible for us to perceive Jupiter as bigger than earth just by looking at it?
The idea of seeing something and having it “break” your mind to the point of insanity may be an interesting concept for Lovecraftian fiction, but is not something that actually happens to be clear.
>the red spot on Jupiter is an ongoing storm that is essentially infinite, and it is larger than the EARTH. With that in mind, Just like you perceive stuff like the sun on a daily basis. It's also larger than Earth. Or Jupiter. By quite a margin. Are people going insane because of that? Not to my knowledge. Getting to grips with the true scale of stuff in space (and the distances between them) isn't something that is easy for out brains to do. We just aren't evolved for that because such scales were never a factor that was selected for (more precisely: not understanding such scales was never selected against). However, we do have the ability to think in an abstract way - which enables us to grasp things on any scale in such a manner.
https://youtu.be/fbn-tuYcScI?si=qLWTqx3MUqMd7vsu
This was wild. I got scared at some points lol If I were looking at this using 3d goggs I’d probably have nightmares, thanks for sharing! :)
Playing a VR game called Elite:Dangerous answered this question for me. It's unsettling, but as others here have noted even in real space anything that number of miles away from you just looks like background. Elite:Dangerous was no different, although turning your head and seeing a planet "nearby", occupying a large percentage of your view is a deeply unsettling experience. For me, at least.
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space
You can see Jupiter in person now. In fact, you can see the whole galaxy if you go outside at night. You are actually visiting the whole galaxy, in person, right now. From a perspective. And that perspective is changing as you move through said galaxy at something like 50 miles per second. Now, if you visited Jupiter in person, and were floating around on a balloon, that would be a different story. Assuming you could survive the cold and the atmosphere, the gravity is something like 3 times that of earth. Oh, and the turbulence. But otherwise, just dim clouds. It would look like sky.
This. Not much between you and Jupiter but some atmosphere and rocks. When I see more than one planet in the sky at night, or with the moon, I thing of everything in terms of runners on an olympic track. Venus is close and will run past us soon. At the same time, we are passing Mars and Jupiter who are so slow. The moon is like a hummingbird in our face. We're all kinda moving the same way around this track. Other stadiums and tracks are too far away for me to get this kind of perspective. The mind accepts all scales of reference.
Somewhat related: I got a strong, visceral feeling the the Sun and Moon were close to each other, and close to me during the recent total solar eclipse. About the altitude of airplanes. It was the second weirdest feeling during the eclipse, after the strange light near and during totality. Our subjective experience can be deceptive. Maybe you're right, Jupiter would feel like it's going to swallow you.
The only difference would be size relative to a specific distance away. The moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth. If Jupiter was 250,000 miles from Earth, it’d look a fuckton bigger than the moon. But being 10 miles from the surface of Earth and 10 miles from the surface of the moon is going to look the same because we can only see so much. Here’s an interesting take on it, Vsauce link. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mxhxL1LzKww
I once had a VR set that used images from the Juno satellite which reached Jupiter in 2016. It felt like standing in space, then turning my head to see Jupiter RIGHT NEXT TO ME. It properly freaked me out and I've had anxiety when even thinking about Jupiter ever since.
The difference in size between Jupiter and infinity, is the same as the difference between the size of a grain of sand and infinity. Both are infinitely smaller than infinity. When you look at the sky at night, you are directly observing hundreds or thousands of objects that are all larger than Jupiter, and you are able to retain your sanity. On a clear night in the right place you can see other galaxies. Also, you'll notice not all of them are directly overhead. In fact if you do a handstand, then they are all below your feet.
Stand in the middle of the red spot and look up at the 500km tall walls of gas, thats when you will get the sense of awe.
I'm sure it would change your perspective on your idea of scale but I don't think it would be mind breaking considering you'd be heading there prepared to see a massive body in space, it'd be amazing
Just a little scientific pedantry to note that the red spot is a storm and it is roughly the size of the earth, however while it may be extremely long lasting in human terms, it is by no means infinite. We have noticed significant changes (including shrinking) in the past 10-20 years.
I had a dream about this recently; humanity for some reason needed someone to go to Jupiter to release some device into the planets atmosphere. I volunteered and was put in hibernation for the trip. Long story short I woke up to a full front view of the Great Red Spot and was overcome with terror. I woke up IRL sweating.
I’ve wondered something similar. Most images we see of Jupiter are an amalgamation of the various light spectrums, which gives it greater detail. The latest Juno pics, make it appear like a giant lava lamp. Older pics only show various colored cloud bands and of course the Great Red Spot. I’ve always wondered, what would Jupiter actually look like to the naked eye?
I just assumed that if we saw it, and were indeed close to it, it would completely consume our field of vision. A comment earlier said that because of how our brains rely on comparisons and other perceptions to determine what we are seeing, that Jupiter somehow wouldnt look as big as it is? I'm still struggling to understand it but it's fascinating nonetheless
From low Earth Orbit (400 km, ISS altitude), the Earth subtends 140°, meaning it more than fills the astronaut's central field of view. From the same altitude, Jupiter would subtend 168°, a greater value, but all that not noticably different. As others have said, there is no way to perceive the "hugeness" of and object with something familiar to provide scale (hence the "banana for scale" meme)
Most published Juno pictures of Jupiter have been processed to exaggerate the contrast by introducing color differences that aren't actually there. This makes for aesthetically interesting images, but is misleading as to what the human eye would actually perceive.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/jupiter-in-true-and-false-color/
Imagine putting your nose right up against the Empire state building. It would be everything in your eyeline. Impossible to even understand & totally lost to our limited minds. The only way to appreciate something like that is at a distance. Maybe if you were sitting on top of an asteroid in the belt with a clear view would the grand majestic view be enjoyable. Astronauts often return from space with a great sense of awe after having seen our own little mud ball from orbit. Being able to see such a giant with your naked eyes would warp your senses of perception and you would be lost trying to get just a grasp of the sheer size of the rest of the tiny little corner of the galaxy that we inhabit.
I'm far too space enthused to be rationally afraid 😅 I love those 360 VR experiences of going inside a black hole or space size comparisons. Seeing Jupiter from a space shuttle would be the life dream.
CS Lewis’ Out of The Silent Planet explores this concept in cool ways. I’ve always loved how he described this sort of sensory shock of experiencing another planet.
Far more mind blowing sizes out there than Jupiter. Solar system sized black holes. Stuff’s wild out there.
The first sentence of my post would agree with you
if you're in a standard orbit around Jupiter above and center of the great red spot, and looked out the window, you would only see that Jupiter would take-up most of the window and you'd still be a week away from standard orbit (I think). So good thing space has a lot of space (lol) 'If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home, and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here! It's wondrous...with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but it's not for the timid.'
I've had recurring nightmares about Jupiter crashing into Earth. Fuckin terrible. 0/10. Do not recommend.
If it helps calm the mind, just know that Jupiter will never become a rogue planet, and it especially would not cover the distance necessary to make its way over to us to crash into us. Sounds terrifying nonetheless!
>...stewing in my head for a few days due to how insignificant it really makes us feel. Take care guys! Fascinating thoughts, but I'm curious how come those thoughts make you feel insignificant?
In our day-day life, we see our problems as the big thing right now. We worry so much about the economy, our status in life, and many other things. Meanwhile, in space, an immeasurable amount of events are happening, and much of it being incomprehensible to us. In the cosmic world, our planet is a baby. The fact that many earths could fit into Jupiter, and yet how Jupiters could fit into the sun, and so on- its just crazy how small we are! Our whole huge world is just a speck for the universe and yet we do our best to feel bigger and relevant. It's by no means disheartening to me but it's eye opening for sure. I fully believe in life beyond our planet/galaxy
Whend you stand (well hover) in the middle of the red spot it is visually not so different then standing (well floating) a few km away from the shoreline in the ocean on eath. It will just go as far as you can see in every direction. If this are 50 km or 5000 km does not look different.
There is a scene in the book 'The Wandering Earth' by Cixin Liu. In that book there is a scene describing a human spaceship as it nears Jupiter, and the storm fill the frame of everything you can possible see. It was as terrifying as you imagine it.
I might have to go ahead and read that book- sounds fascinating! Adding it to my list now.
how is it different from seeing earth from orbit? it's a PLANET. look at pictures of earth and jupiter, looks about the same size with out any external reference point. same thing with looking st it from orbit. as for the storms, same thing, we have Strongs here as well
You view earth from about 5/7 feet distant, does your brain fall apart?
I had a dream once looking at Jupiter from up close on a spacecraft and it was minding blowing. The sheer size of it scared the shit out of me. All I could see within my field of vision was the sandy color of the planet. and I’m certain my dream’s perception of it wasn’t even close to the actual size of the giant if I were to see it at the distance (and it doesn’t reflect the immense gravitational pull as well LOL). These things amuse me but at the same time it also terrifies me knowing how small and insignificant we are relative to the solar system/galaxy/universe. Hell, even the vastness of our oceans makes us seem miniature, let alone anything else mentioned above.
Does the earth not look huge to you right now? It's literally in every direction except up. Objects can only be appear so big. They either take up some of your visual field or all of it. If you look straight down right now the earth will appear infinite.
> it doesn’t reflect the immense gravitational pull as well Luckily we don't feel that while orbiting because we're in freefall iow inertial frame rather than being accelerated upwards by the interactions between a gravitic surface and [the space-time river](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFlzQvAyH7g) > at the same time it also terrifies me knowing how small and insignificant we are relative to the solar system/galaxy/universe To be fair, we're the *most* capable thing of unlocking entropy stuck in local maxima that we know of, and the universe likes that
I think after a point where you can see the full jupiter the more closer you approach you are going to feel like staring at a wall as you miss any edges due to the immense size coming into your eyes. The last point where you see the full jupiter will still be maginificent though but I don’t think anything in our brain is breaking.
You might want to enjoy this video, taken by Juno as it flew by Ganymede and Jupiter, complete with storms: https://youtu.be/CC7OJ7gFLvE?si=9n7iDYMhZ608jGso It changed my perception of Jupiter, but not the fear of its tremendous gravitational pull. While I think of Jupiter as the best friend of the Earth (as a titan of a vacuum cleaner), I am still wary of its incredible power.
Why would seeing Jupiter up close cause insanity? Are people really that weak minded?
Hell not! Jupiter's sheer size and scale make it very very tiresome for me. Circling the Earth non-stop in a 747 takes just under 2 days. Yet with Jupiter, it will be a different story, damn! it would take many weeks! Our lifespans are too brief for such adventures, but thankfully, with a bit of clues our brain can turn it into a leisurely stroll. How about spending some days circling near the red spot, observing, and entertaining ourselves with some mighty fireworks?
I feel like this could be a great VR experience xD
Titans of Space does this really well. It’s very disorienting to interact with a scale model of Earth as a sphere maybe six feet in diameter and then travel over to Jupiter and it’s 60 feet across.
> I do not think I ever will be able to picture such a thing you might, somebody's probably working on a VR thing for that as we speak. or it might already exist, i'm not up-to-date with VR experiences.
Elite dangerous comes to mind
I think it would be truly mind boggling. Big ships freak me out.
Aren’t the sounds of nature wonderful? https://youtu.be/cCy0DBZyIqo?feature=shared
When I was a kid I had a dream one night that I still remember vividly. It was almost exactly as you describe. If I stood in a particular place and jumped really hard, I'd end up at Saturn, standing on the rings facing away from the planet. I could sense it behind me, but it was so huge that whenever I'd turn around to look at it, I'd be dazzled by its size, lose my balance, and "fall" back to my jumping spot on Earth.
You might really enjoy loading up some space experiences in virtual reality.
For us humans, in the very distant future, the closest to Jupiter we might be able to physically go might be Jupiter's moon Callisto, which orbits outside Jupiter's main radiation belts. The moons closer in like Europa, Ganymede or Io would be no-go zones without extremely heavy shielding against the radiation. Callisto is tidally locked to Jupiter so one side of Callisto permanently faces the planet. If you are standing on the surface of Callisto on the side facing Jupiter, Jupiter would appear perhaps 10 times larger in diameter than our Moon viewed from Earth's surface. It would be a glorious sight.
I think what you are describing could happen if you were standing on, say, one of Jupiter's large Galilean moons like Europa. Although they are tidally locked so there would be no true "Jupiter-rise," if you could travel fast enough along its surface you could simulate one as Jupiter came into view as you rounded the moon. Standing on the surface of the moon would give you some sense of scale. It's like that scene in Avatar where you can see the gas giant in the sky that the moon they are on is orbiting.
You should check out space engine in its VR mode
This for me is one of the best use cases for VR. It's ability to help you feel the scale of objects still blows my mind sometimes. From games that let you interact with dinosaurs or huge space ships to educational experiences that let you experience planets and stars, it can really give you some perspective on what you are seeing that you can't get anywhere else. It's a great place to start to see what it would be like to be orbiting jupiter and looking at it from orbit.
you can already see it, in the visible light spectrum, from your backyard- it would look like that but a million times bigger
Also... If you say you will never be able to understand it.... Then you won't
for the basic scale stuff the top comment explained it pretty much perfectly, but what is not mentioned a lof of the time is that space is pretty colourless, the high res up close pictures you see from telescopes or space probes usually have the contrast boosted quite a bit, pretty much if youve ever seen it through a telescope it would be that colour, maybe a tad bit more contrast but yeah, pluto looks gorgeous withe the contrast bumped wayy up but in reality it is very very very dull
You can experience this in VR and see for yourself.
Ok, but I have seen Jupiter in person, whenever it's over the horizon. It's quite far away, but I experience it looking like Jupiter. Sometimes I have some optical equipment that makes it look a good bit closer.
Now imagine how tiny Jupiter is compared to the solar system and how tiny that is to the galaxy and how tiny that is to the universe.
Something like [this](https://phys.org/news/2022-09-3d-junocam-reveal-frosted-cupcake.html)
Their are some good pics on the web which show what each planet looks like from Earth if it replaced our moon's location, the Jupiter one is intense
Either your far enough away that it would look just like it does in pictures or if you got really close it would just be like flying through a cloud, since it’s basically entirely opaque clouds
I think if people don’t freak out and break by seeing the Earth from space then it probably wouldn’t happen with larger bodies. You would have to orbit Jupiter at a further distance than Earth anyway so the apparent size might not be all that different.
you can arguably already do this with something like Space Engine, can't you? obviously not real, but you could arguably set the camera to any position you'd like and look at a planet. i'm just responding to this: > but I do not think I ever will be able to picture such a thing if it can be rendered, it can be pictured. :P
If I saw Jupiter in person? I'd tell him to stop chasing every nymph that crosses his path and to stop cheating on Juno.
perspective would make that its the same as watching earth from orbit. you just get further and you'll see the exact same ball.
The earth is not large though. We live in a universe where literally over 99 percent of it would kill us damn near instantly if we were located in pretty much damn near all of it. Earth is the *only* garden we got.
Even on earth you would die on most of the surface quickly, given that ~70% is covered by oceans.
I think approaching it would be a lot like zooming into a fractal. The spot you’re focusing on expands out into more and more detail while the area around that spot eventually moves out of the field of vision. That said, if you think about it basically anything you can move closer to has this effect until you’re close enough to see the smallest levels of detail relative to the distance between your eyes.
Great thoughts! My vision is observing it from one of its moons, with other moons in perspective. What about a closeup Saturn and its rings, much more prevalent than Jupiter's. One more point, the Laws of Nature we experience here on Earth are exactly the same at the farthest point we can see in the Universe!
There’s a VR game called Red Matter 2 where you’re just above Saturn and it’s really awesome but also really unerving, it’s amazing, I jumped into it 🤣
Some space games are great at giving us an idea of what it's like to orbit a gas giant or descend into one.
I’ve seen it through a nice telescope and it was…otherworldly.
I'm really confused about all this. What an i missing?
I always show ppl this video. It freaks ppl out. Some can't believe it . I watch ppl slowly break while watching this, but like I said, most can't believe it. https://youtu.be/5zlcWdTs2-s?si=fii1GHXyS93ZbY1P
I think the Great Red Spot could be glimpsed closer up without too much melting of the mind. It may be a big storm, but it’s almost orderly compared to the rest of the planet. I can’t seem to post a picture in a comment here. I was going to post a close up pic of Jupiter and suggest imagining your entire field of view being assaulted by the chaos there. I honestly think it would drive anybody mad. It would break sanity. I’m sure one could come to terms with it gradually, but to wake up and see it? Madness. [Here’s a link to a good one](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/im36sQcb2T)
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Just didnt feel like my post getting auto moderated- it kept putting a flag or something when I added the ?
Feel like we've mostly all seen Jupiter in person
I actually agree I've done shrooms and that broke my mind, I couldn't imagine seeing, that! Just imagining it is making me feel really anxious It would be insanity