Any science classroom would seem incomplete without a picture
of our solar system.(School classroom teacher teaching on the black board solar system drawing
show solar system with astroid belt) The Sun is always in the center, along with eight planets
orbiting it… or perhaps nine, if you love Pluto as much as we do.(Zoom on black board show solar
system with 8 planet then let the pluto come in screen show blush or love mark on pluto) All
of those planets are followed by the Kuiper Belt,(kuiper belt apear) which is contained
within the enigmatic Oort Cloud.(Zoom out more show oort cloud) We can witness their
opulence and wonder at the magnificence of the Great Beyond – the vast emptiness
of deep space.(zoom out the ort cloud then galaxy show multiple galaxy in universe)
The only thing is… all of these pictures are wrong. Sorry to shatter those childhood
dreams.(universe scene continue big cross comes) No, we’re not claiming that the positions of the
planets are wrong,(again solar system) or that the Kuiper Belt is some conspiracy propagated by the
Illuminati.(some cartoon people rumour about kuiper belt) The content of these classroom
diagrams isn’t up for debate,(blackboard solar system again) but what is problematic is the
fact that they ignore the most important feature of the Solar System – all the
space inside of it! Confused? Let’s take a trip through the Solar System and try to understand
just how vast it truly is.(astronaut wearing helmet & suiting up & rocket launching scene)
Intro 1) Imagine that you’re
sitting in a spaceship that has just started its journey from the sun and is moving outwards. (Man
in spaceship show start from window & then zoom out show rocket running from sun) You will see the
inner planets first. (zoom out show inner planets once)They happen to be very close to the Sun,
so there’s nothing extraordinarily dramatic about the distances between them.(Zoom in slowly to the
rocket) What is dramatic, however, is their minuscule sizes. If the Sun’s diameter was reduced
in scale to 30 cm, the average length of a ruler, Mercury would be 1 mm wide, Venus would be 2.6 mm,
Earth would be 2.7 mm wide, and Mars would only be 1.4 mm wide. The inner planets are basically
the size of a period in comparison to an A4 notebook paper-sized Sun! (keep the rocket
running to the mars & zoom sun to mars, put ruller & mejer the distance or every planet)
2) The journey from Mars to Jupiter is 3 times as long as the journey from the Sun to Mars. Sure,
it has an asteroid belt in between, but that isn’t as packed with asteroids as you may
think. As a matter of fact, if you clumped all the asteroids together, they would only
constitute about 4% of the Moon’s mass. In other words, don’t worry about your favorite sci-fi
spacecraft getting smashed to bits by asteroids – there’s plenty of empty space around them!
3) Jupiter is significantly larger than all the inner planets,
but the Sun is still about 10 times larger than Jupiter – the 5th planet from the Sun.
4) The next big and beautiful planet on our journey is Saturn! This is another gas giant,
much like Jupiter,(Rocket moves Jupiter to Saturn) and is approximately 12 times smaller
than the Sun.(Compare 12 Saturn to sun) As we move further away from Saturn, (move rocket ahead)there
is hardly anything out there to grab our attention.(astroid running) The thing is, humans
aren’t evolved enough to understand the scale of emptiness that defines the majority of our solar
system,(man evolving scene last man black & border white “inside the border still not enough”) let
alone the entire universe.(hand side the universe) If we see a point, we immediately
search for another, because everything in between is inconsequential to us.(saturn
moves 4 time square) However, the universe in which we live wasn’t created to accommodate our
narrow mindsets.(brian & universe zoom out & in) 5) Finally, we reach Uranus, but if you think
we’re nearing the end of our journey, think again! Uranus is actually located around
the midpoint between the Sun and Pluto. 6) Neptune is far away. I mean really,
really far away. The distance from Jupiter to Neptune is 5 times longer than the distance from
Earth to Jupiter. At this point, you’re probably beginning to realize that the universe is made
up almost entirely of Nothing. Technically, it’s 99.999999999999999999958% nothing but Nothing!
7) At long last, we reach Pluto. Perhaps you can understand why some people no longer consider it
a planet. To be fair, it is extremely remote – 40 times farther away from Earth than the Earth
is from the Sun. If Jupiter was as large as the period (or full stop) ending a statement,
Pluto would still be 10 meters away from Earth! Not only that, but Pluto is also tiny – less than
half the size of Mercury, to be exact. 8) That’s a pretty exhausting trip,
don’t you think? If a map of the Solar System was created to scale, with the Moon being the
size of a single pixel, 1,256 computer screens held side-by-side would be required to encompass
the entire distance from the Sun to Pluto. If printed, this map would be 145 meters long,
which is about the size of 1.5 soccer fields. 9) You may not believe this, but we’re not quite
done yet! We still have the Kuiper belt to navigate, and we still have to reach the Oort
Cloud! Surely it can’t be that far out, right? The fastest spacecraft ever made is New Horizons,
which just recently sent back amazing high-definition images of Pluto. At a
speed of 58,536 km/hr, it took New Horizons 9 years and 9 months to reach Pluto.
10) If we continued traveling at the same speed beyond Pluto, we would reach the Oort cloud
– and I’m sorry to say this - in 10,000 years! Yes. The Oort Cloud is REALLY far away. The
distance from the Sun to Pluto is just 1/50,000th of the way out of the Solar System. With almost
nothing out there but random icy rocks like Pluto, as well as potential comets, traveling
beyond Pluto is ‘uneventful’, to say the least. As you can see, ‘Space’ is definitely the most
appropriate name you can give to the Universe. We’re just accidental glitches in an otherwise
uniform expanse of Nothing. I suppose that’s why our existence is so special!