How far away is the Sun?

[quaesoveritas]

A question asked  by Chris Mason, of an expert on BBC Breakfast, during the launch of the Parker Solar Probe, this morning.

Possibly he asked for the benefit of viewers but how many would not know this basic "school child"*  fact about the solar system?

And the expert did not say "about 93 mllion miles, but instead said:

"The best way to think about it is how long it takes light to reach the earth from the sun, which is about 8 minutes."

Is that the best way to think of it?

To but that fact into context you have to have a knowledge of of how fast light travels and be able to convert that into distance.

If you think that 93 milion miles (or whatever that is in KM) is hard to visualise, you just have to say that the Moon is about a quarter of a million miles away,

so its about 370 times further than the Moon. 

How difficult is that to understand.

* If every school child doesn't know that, the education system in this country must have declined enormously since I was at school.

[Trevor Harley]

Oddly only yesterday a friend admitted that they didn't know how far away the sun was, but they did know it would take about 3500 years to walk there.

[quaesoveritas]

How old is the friend?

Maybe its a generational thing.

That seems to me to be another useless fact.

You have to make an assumption about how fast you walk in an hour then multiply by 24*365*3500,

I reckon that works out at 3 mph, but I always thought that it was higher.

It all depends on the speed and other assumptions.

I couldn't cope with the size of the solar system in walking times.

Seems totally illogical to me.

[Brian Wakem]

On Sunday, 12 August 2018 12:18:44 UTC+1, quaesoveritas wrote:

You have to make an assumption about how fast you walk in an hour then multiply by 24*365*3500,

I reckon that works out at 3 mph, but I always thought that it was higher.

I guess fighting against Earth's gravity, then the lack of oxygen, then the lack of atmosphere and near absolute zero temps, solar radiation and then the super-intense heat from the sun and it's limb tearing gravitational pull, might affect your walking speed.  Oh and not having anything to walk on.

What a ludicrous way of describing the distance to the sun!  93 million miles is something anyone can understand!

[Stephen Davenport]

Mourning for the current education system is predicated on the assumption that the explanation in question was aimed at current or recent schoolchildren. I doubt that it specifically was. You only have to tune in to the occasional quiz show to see how spectacularly ignorant and incurious about the solar system and universe many evidently intelligent middle-aged and older people are (present company excepted). The lack sometimes of even the most basic knowledge astounds me and I'm entirely unconvinced that it's generational. Except that amongst the young the answer would be ~150,000,000 km rather than ~93,000,000 miles.

Nevertheless, that would have been the simplest statement for the expert in question to have made. It wouldn't have filled much air time, though.The time it takes for the sun's light to reach us would have perhaps been a useful illustrative supplement.


Stephen
Indianapolis, IN.

[quaesoveritas]

I am afraid I was educated before KM were invented!

I didn't think was directed at current schoolchildren - unlikely that they would be watching the News Channel at 08:30.

But I think most children of my generation would know.

It's more the generation of the news presenters, who never seem to remember anything they are told for more than a day.

[Trevor Harley]

Surely the distance should be described in the number of lengths London buses it will take to reach the sun, or perhaps the number of Trafalgar Columns?

[Stephen Davenport]

On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 12:02:39 PM UTC-4, quaesoveritas wrote:

 

I didn't think was directed at current schoolchildren - unlikely that they would be watching the News Channel at 08:30.

I'm afraid I must have been confused by your specific statement that "If every school child doesn't know that, the education system in this country must have declined enormously since I was at school."

But I think most children of my generation would know.

 I don't believe that any more of your generation or my generation would know than the current generation. But neither of us can definitively ratify those guesses beyond anecdote. Moreover, I'm pretty sure that there are subjects on which current schoolchildren have greater knowledge than we ever did. 

It's more the generation of the news presenters, who never seem to remember anything they are told for more than a day.

There are some excellent and incisive news presenters so I wouldn't tar them all with that brush; but, yes, plenty are pretty vacuous or believe that their audiences are. If memory serves I would not doubt that breakfast tv presenters would be in the vanguard of the latter but I haven't seen TV over the morning repast in a very long time.


Stephen
Indianapolis, IN.

[Stephen Davenport]

On Monday, August 13, 2018 at 4:10:12 AM UTC-4, Trevor Harley wrote:

Surely the distance should be described in the number of lengths London buses it will take to reach the sun, or perhaps the number of Trafalgar Columns?

Absolutely. And the sun's diameter in Waleses, and its volume in Olympic swimming pools.


Stephen
Indianapolis, IN. 

[Tudor Hughes]

I've known the distance to the sun since the age of about 6.  My Mum told me.  This would be about 1949.

Tudor Hughes

[Jack Frost]

But... why should anyone know the distance to the sun? How is it going to help them in their everyday life? It isn't. It's just a fact they would know. And if it's just a fact we want them to know, why is the distance to the sun more important than knowing the name of the ship Darwin sailed on, or who won celebrity big brother, or what the water pressure in an average household is? We all like different things. I don't care if someone doesn't know the distance to the sun!

It's like on University Challenge. There are always questions on classical composers, books and poetry. Why does knowing that make you more intelligent than knowing who the members of some pop group are, or what a Stephen King novel is about, or who won Love Island? It's just snobbery.

Anyway, I digress!

Liam

Chicago

[quaesoveritas]

Why would anyone want to know anything?

I want to know what sort of Universe we live in and how big it is.

Human beings are the only life form on earth which has evolved the intelligence to even ask the question.

If we are not going to ask questions like that we might as well be a cow, or a dog, or a mouse, or a worm, or a bacteria.

Knowledge is not the same as intelligence.

Knowing who won Love Island doesn't advance civilisation, probably quite the reverse.

Dickens is better than Stephen King, Mozart is better than Boyzone (whoever they are).

[Jack Frost]

Stephen King >> Dickens and Boyzone >> Mozart. Just in my opinion of course. It's a good job there are no right answers to these things! Actually, that last one should be Megadeth >> Boyzone >> Mozart. Heavy metal music rules! :-D

Liam

Chicago

[Len]

Intelligence. Now there's a funny thing.

Len

Wembury

[Tudor Hughes]

       People are naturally curious - they see things and want to know more about them.  All sorts of things.  Everything.  I find it impossible not to be interested in the distance of the sun and therefore how big it is for one thing.  The same can't be said for Shag Archipelago and its bimbos and himbos.

Tudor Hughes

[quaesoveritas]

A thing I find annoying about BBC Breakfast is that they seem to give equal weight to stories about the weather, science, sport and trash tv.

One minute they are talking about plastic pollution and how terrible it is, the next they are extolling the virtues of some charity that has released thousands of balloons into the atmosphere in "memory" of someone who has died, without apparently seeing the irony in this.

A few days ago they spent a long time talking about "Love Island", which isn't even on BBC, but on some obscure ITV channel.

I suppose its appealing to a wide audience but I think it degrades the important topics and elevates the trivial ones.

They also seem to be much more expert and knowledgeable about the latter.

On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 05:38:54 UTC+1, Tudor Hughes wrote:e

[Metman2012]

I think it's time this thread was brought to a close as it no longer has anything to do with weather and climate. It's the sort of thing that would be better on the other weather forum - though that doesn't have such irrelevancy much any more.