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For getting the feel of the milky way, I think there's nothing that is better able to simulate it than a video game, ala Elite Dangerous. I loved to navigate its galaxy map. The size of the Milky Way, the numbers of stars and distances between them are of scale in there if I recall correctly.

I found a neat little artist page where they have the local star map, the milky way, the local super cluster and a bunch of other neat laser crystal stuff: https://www.bathsheba.com/crystal/#astro

I'd get one, or for that shipping cost make a better one and send them the data, but current shipping in and out of the US is ... interesting.

A quick google on openscad shows how someone build a model of the solar system: https://www.chrisfinke.com/2016/03/08/animating-the-solar-sy... if anyone else wants to have a go this would be a good place to start generating a model to send to the artist.

When the Fermi Paradox was first posited, scientists and engineers seemed to believe that interstellar travel was soon to be technologically achievable, a few decades, maybe centuries for the less optimistic. Progress around space propulsion has kind of stalled since then and we should maybe question the possibility of interstellar travel as this would give an easy but unpleasant answer to the famous paradox.

Tangential comment, but it’s crazy to think about how, when we look up at the stars in the sky, we’re seeing light in wildly varying degrees of age.

For example, when we look at the sun, that’s 8-minutes-old light. When we look at Polaris (the North Star), that light is 447 years old.

When we look at Andromeda?

Yeah, that light is 2.5 million years old.

This is interesting to me because somehow I’ve had in my head that if we develop the ability in the next couple centuries to send probes interstellar it would be a longer list of possible targets. What this makes me realize is the list of places we visit even in the next thousands of years - even with incredible leaps in propulsion - is very finite. Space may be really really big but the part physically accessible even in long timescales is limited.

The Atlas of the Universe was an immensely valuable resource when I was making the SpaceWalks series: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLul2c76M6HJySkSXYMoLXW9VC...

During COVID, I had a lot of spare time and an aversion to reading the news or indeed anything on social media. So, I got interested in trying to wrap my head around the scale of the universe. I built an app called VOS - https://vos.ajmoon.com - which would plot things at scale on a map, allowing me to plan a walk (e.g. from the sun to Pluto) with various celestial objects at that scale. Then I made videos of some of those walk plans, explaining what you'd encounter. It was a lot of fun!

We live in a great neighborhood, but we’re behind on our HOA fees.

I swear there used to be a 3d map that you could navigate, rotate zoom in zoom out of local space, but I can't find it anymore.

Does anyone else remember that or am I imagining it? I think it was like 10 years ago

If you can travel near the speed of light, the trip back to a future era of Earth would almost always be more exciting than stepping onto a distant barren planet.

Edit: "back to a future era" hehe-- i.e., the trip away and then back to Earth at near-light speeds will always put you way further into the future than you would have been just staying put on Earth. At the current rate of technological change, you're guaranteed some exciting new changes that will almost always be more exciting and surprising than whatever planet you visited.

Looks like it hasn't been updated in a while. Wikipedia has us at 26 stars within 12.5 ly now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

Notably, Luhman 16, which is just 6.51 ly away, but is so dim and in such a crowded patch of sky it was only discovered in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhman_16

I love seeing sites like this! The formatting is very endearing to me

It should be a goal for Earth to send a probe to one of those stars. As the probe will be unmaned, a mission taking a hundred years or more is not out of question.

I always wondered why do we care about stuff outside of Solar system. Apart from the "wow" factor, what else are the real uses for info? I think anything beyond solar system is unlikely to have an impact on the life on the Earth.

Always when I see a map like this I get this weird feeling inside between depression and hope. Between amazement and sadness.

That's the neighborhood. Maybe two stars might have planets that could support life. Maybe.

I can barely read the stars' names, this font choice was a mistake.

1995 website.

This great illustration looks like it might have been inspired by a National Geographic poster.

Here's the one they say is from October 1999:

https://www.natgeomaps.com/hm-1999-the-universe

I remember this one was an updated version of a poster they published in the late 1970s or early 80s -- I had a copy on my wall in 1985.

My calculator says that's 4.5 days at warp 9.