Grrl Power #1419 - Inquisitor vocare (Patreon)

Thank you for the support! You guys and grrls are awesome!

Sydney just has an inquisitive nature, is all. And she often thinks of obvious questions that no one has bothered asking, because they're obvious, but sometimes  thinks of advanced questions that no one has yet considered, but when she does that, it's even odds that she's skipping over intermediary understanding. 

Sydney's rough estimate of the station being "10 miles" from the "surface" of the star stem from her never having been 100,000 kilometers away from an object 12 million kilometers in diameter. The star "looked big" to her. Honestly, the scale of things in space would probably be very difficult to estimate to the untrained eyes. Heck, being in an environment without atmospheric haze would mess people up, and would also make for razor sharp shadows and the surface of that huge moon you're standing on look like a bad special effect. 

I've tried to picture what standing at the base of Olympus Mons would look like. Unlike most mountains on Earth, OM isn't surrounded by other mountains. There's no real "base" to Everest, just other mountain peaks smashed up against it. But OM more or less pops out of an endless plain, so you could stand at the base and look up to the top, which is ~3x as high as Everest. The other trick to visualizing it is to remember that Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, and no moisture, so there wouldn't be any obscuring clouds, and atmospheric has would be vastly reduced. The other other trick, though, is to remember that OM has roughly the same footprint as Texas. You can't stand at one end of Texas and see the middle, even assuming no atmospheric perspective, because the Earth curves away from you. The slope of OM does exceed the curvature of Mars's surface, so while I think you could see the peak while standing at the base, I don't think it would look as high as you might guess? I don't know, and I'm pretty sure no one has ever taken a photograph from the base, and I also don't think anyone has made an accurate 3D model of what it might look like. 

Imagine a planet the size of Jupiter, only it's a rocky world that a human could stand on without being crushed somehow. I don't know, maybe it's hollow. The Red Spot on Jupiter is larger than the Earth. If humanity had evolved on a planet like that, it's conceivable that civilization wouldn't have migrated, what, 4 or 5 times past that Red Spot size up until we invented airplanes, and that's assuming somewhat favorable environments to explore, and that the Red Spot "Eden Zone" we evolved in wasn't surrounded by 10,000 miles of desert on every side. It's a scale that's honestly really difficult to imagine. I think most people don't even appreciate how large the Earth is. 

Anyway, things in space are big and usually far away until you hop in a ship and then they're not far away, and then people would be like, "I can't tell how big that is. It could be a moon, it could be a space station. I need some sensor readings or at least one banana for scale."