this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Too autistic for this. Why would it be unsettling? Mercury is much smaller than the sun. If it was suddenly bigger in proportion to the sun, then I'd be unsettled.
It doesn't exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be... humbling, I guess?
I had a co-worker a while back who couldn't talk about the great scale of the universe cause he'd get freaked out. It didn't come up much, but when it did, he'd be like, "Please stop, it's stressing me out" so we'd change the subject.
Less about size and more about size and relative distance. Think about being on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun - and yet it survives.
I've never thought about this and holy shit
I mean, nothing on Mercury survives. At night it's -170 degrees Celsius and +430 degrees at day.
There was a time people thought Mercury would have some "twilight" acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.
So we just need movable habitats like in Howl’s Moving Castle or Mortal Engines
Those are some mercurial tempera...tures
It's very hard to convey the size of the sun in a photo. On earth, it isn't bigger than the moon. I don't think I've ever seen, in a real photo, just how massive the sun is. I absolutely dwarfs a planet, which is kind of chilling. I've never seen a photo that shows anything further away from the camera than a planet AND that much bigger.
Right, I feel like no astronomer should be unsettled by just a picture of our solar system.
You're not invited to my birthday party.