The snail, the airplane, and the human inability to comprehend space
One day Alice was travelling on an airplane going across the pacific ocean. Because she was bored she stared out of the window even though not much could be seen. That was however still more interesting than staring at the stopwatch she had taken with her in a physics teachers atempt to explain time dilation. Planes, as is known, usually travel very fast. Though if they didn't they wouldn't stop flying immediately, they just would get a very specific destination reassigned. Usually a spot on the ground directly below them. So Alice was switching between staring at her stopwatch and out the window thinking how much better it was than Bobs situation who was staring at his stopwatch on the ground.
The stopwatch told Alice that there were seven hours remaining flight time, a look out the window told her nothing. She may as well be moving at snails pace, it would all look the same anyways. But how far could a snail get in the time the airplane took to fly over the pacific ocean and how small woud the earth have to be that they'd be the same pace to scale.
The largest globe on earth, Eartha in Yarmouth, Maine, is just a bit to small for that scale and it's already massive. But we need to add two meters to the diameter to get to a 14 meter globe. That's as tall as a five storey building. And the snail's just booking it across. But Alice sometimes has to go to the moon for some sort of logical conundrum or gravity explanations and now she wonders how to get there with the snail scale. Well it would take over two weeks to get there moving so slowly with our jet airliner snail. The good news is however we would only be going halfway across central park to a sphere 4 meters in diameter. We now need a faster mode of transportation.
The Parker Solar Probe at its fastest in the snail universe travels at twice the speed of a galapagos turtle, around 650 meters in one hour. This cuts down the trip between the house sized earth and the bungalow sized moon across half of central park down to 40 minutes. Can we think about going to mars now? That depends on where Mars is. Unlike the moon which likes the earth very much and stays very close, mars sometimes is on the other side of the sun. When it's not however we can think of it as a 7.5 meter sphere on the runway on the sikorsky memorial sirport near Bridgeport, Connecticut. Our shiny new speedy takes just enough time for a stuck hiker to chew of his own arm. In other words almost a week. The snail however would lag behind a bit with a travel time of almost a decade. Can we go any faster or further? No, the Parker Solar Probe is the fastest thing we got because it goes very near the sun and orbital mechanics just does that. (don't break in space you'll speed up)
If after all this travelling you wish to go to a warm place in the solar system we can offer trips to the sun, a sphere blockind the delaware river just past Philadelphia. Flying there is the perfect length of a cruise, 10 days. And if you want to spend some time there you could camp out for the next 20 years waiting for the airplane snail.
"Hold on" Alice thinks "Isn't all this just the inner solar system?", "Yes" said the voice usually explaining things between her and Bob when stuck in a logical dilemma or a time travel paradox "Let's go to Jupiter".
Jupiter is even further away than the sun, it's in Charlotte, North Carolina when thinking of a snail the speed of an airplane in Central Park. Anyways I'm getting bored, let's go straight to Voyager 1. We're somewhere off the southwest coast of Australia. It would take you just 4.5 years to get there and we haven't even gone Interstellar yet.
Brace yourselves this is going to get insane. In our small model, where airplanes go as fast as snails.
Proxima Centauri the closest star
Is as far away from earth as the real earth is
Alice gave up thinking about the universe and returned to staring at her stopwatch. That was easier.
