On an Internet of Shit, a cool website feels newsworthy, and graphic designer Josh Worth has made a very cool website. If The Moon Were Only One Pixel is a "tediously accurate" recreation of our stellar neighborhood you can explore in your browser, and it's a meditative, thoughtful way to break up the monotony of being advertised to on the web.
Like it says in the title, the page scales down our solar system so each pixel onscreen represents 3,474.8 kilometers—the diameter of the moon, and about the distance between New York and Las Vegas. Below, Worth included a ruler marking out every 100,000 and 1,000,000 km, as well as a button to auto scroll at the scale speed of light—a leisurely, Star Wars opening crawl pace.
The model helpfully scrolls through one scale light-minute of distance in about a minute's worth of time, and at that pace, it would take nearly five hours to reach the end of the page. That's how long it takes light from our sun to reach Pluto, and Worth helpfully points out that it would take 665 screens (presumably at 1080p) laid end-to-end to present the whole thing at once. I guess you could get away with one ultra-wide monitor instead.
Familiarity and the galactic scale of so much sci-fi can condition us to see the solar system as safe and familiar, but really, it's an utterly massive, fathomless thing. That's something I always appreciated about the fiction behind Destiny, which is limited to the solar system and treats the "Jovian" space beyond the asteroid belt as its Wild West-come-sci-fi Mordor.
Interspersed throughout the mostly black field of Worth's solar system, he's included thoughtful musings about how most of space is just, well, space, and how you can view that with shock and terror, or wonder at the miracle that there's anything out there at all—it sort of reminded me of the end of True Detective (spoilers for a really good 11-year-old show, I guess).
For more projects from Josh Worth, you can check out his website or follow him on X, "The Everything App."
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