The Real Stars and Scale of Sci-fi
Jan 22, 2024
Some of the franchises mentioned: Star Trek, The Martian, Dune, Bobiverse, Halo, Mass Effect, Firefly, Serenity, Stargate, Guardians of the Galaxy, Known Space, Hyperion, The Expanse, Foundation, and A Fire Upon the Deep — placed at their real distances, at the real scale of the galaxy.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Intro
- 00:43 — Star Wars
- 02:25 — Voyager 1
- 03:15 — Galactic scale
- 04:45 — Intergalactic scale
- 05:13 — Andromeda
- 06:10 — Stargate
- 08:48 — Starship Troopers
- 09:11 — Foundation
- 10:17 — A Fire Upon the Deep
- 10:59 — The Star Trek galaxy
- 12:21 — 1000 light years
- 16:29 — 100 light years
- 26:00 — Firefly/Serenity
- 29:40 — Dune
- 31:21 — Known Space
- 33:16 — Bobiverse
- 34:09 — Homo Sideria
Corrections
There is an error in the depiction of the tilt of the Earth: it is tilted away from the galactic core, not towards it.
Also, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture it was a fictional Voyager 6, launched in 1999, that fell into a wormhole — though it is still unlikely that there's a wormhole hanging out just outside the solar system.
Sources
Star positions come from the astronexus AT-HYG and HYG 3.5 databases.
- Oort cloud: arXiv:astro-ph/0512256 and the Wikipedia summary
- The Sun at 26,000 light years from the core: ApJ 830, 17
- Size of the Milky Way: The Observatory 118, 201
- Two trillion galaxies: ApJ 830, 83
- Sagittarius A*: ApJ 194, 265 and ANS 324, 497
- Betelgeuse supernova: ApJ 819, 7