Last September we all couldn’t wait to run outside and see the Super Blood Moon in all its glory. That beautiful sight only appeared 14% larger than the Moon normally looks to us, so I feel fairly confident in saying that if our humble little planet suddenly packed up and moved to become a moon itself, a moon of Jupiter, that our species would never get anything done. We’d spend all our time staring at the sky.
In this short, stunning little video from YouTube user Orion17, we get to see what our view of the cosmos would look like in that exact scenario, where we were just another moon of our solar system’s largest planet.
And if the video makes it seem impossibly large, make no mistake that the gas giant is way bigger than us, as “more than 1,000 Earths would fit inside” Jupiter’s 89,000-mile wide diameter. (For some idea of the size difference, our moon has a diameter roughly 2,160 miles, making it a little more than one/fourth the size of Earth.)
Not that Jupiter would notice us anyway even if we did move into its shadow, since it already has 62 known moons. I stress known since they only found the last ones in 2003–we don’t know nearly as much about our own solar system as we’d like, let alone the rest of space.
I love this video because it is a reminder we are an impossibly small little piece of the universe, and it’s never a bad thing to remember that, especially when we it helps us appreciate how lucky we are to even be aware of the fact we are here at all.
What did this video make you think of? Tell us whatever came into your mind watching this, using our comments section below.
Images: YouTube/Orion17