Plutonian Factoids.

I have been splashing about today in a very interesting book, Bill Bryson’s international bestseller, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson knows how to take non-fiction and turn it into something fun and hilarious. I split a gut reading his book about Australia, In A Sunburned Country. The guy is truly a nutbar.
In A Short History of Nearly Everything he is doing a similar thing with the world of science. He relates scientific facts about astronomy, biology, mathematics, and well... nearly everything, in a way that is sure to crack you up while at the same time you absorb the compendium of data.
He begins with a section on our solar system, and some of the stuff he was saying about Pluto (not the Disney character) was just so amazing that I wanted to bloggify it here.
So what follows is a direct quote, albeit truncated, from pages 22 to 24:

“It is certainly true that Pluto doesn’t act much like the other planets. Not only is it runty and obscure, but it is so variable in its motions that no one can tell you exactly where Pluto will be a century hence. Whereas the other planets orbit on more or less the same plane, Pluto’s orbital path is tipped (as it were) out of alignment at an angle of seventeen degrees, like the brim of a hat tilted rakishly on someone’s head. Its orbit is so irregular that for substantial periods on each of its lonely circles around the sun it is closer to us than Neptune is. For most of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Neptune was in fact the solar system’s most far-flung planet. Only on February 11, 1999, did Pluto return to the outside lane, there to remain for the next 228 years.
So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forty-eight states. This alone makes it extremely anomalous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball.

Even at the speed of light, it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. [from Earth].

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t even possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system drawn to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away.
So the solar system is really quite enormous. By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun – our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life-giving Sun – has shrunk to the size of a pinhead. It is little more than a bright star.”

Just fascinating stuff.
Outer space is so....... spacious!
Bryson goes on to quote the words of Carl Sagan,“If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion.” Remember Sagan? He just loved those words ending in “illion.”