| 16. |
The tiny circle inside the smallest square now contains the whole field in which
the vicissitudes of the solar system take place. If we continue the reckoning
we used in drawings 4, 5, and 9, we should be now at a height of 5 million
million kilometers above the horizon of that village in Holland from where we
started. As we have imagined all along that we are making our trip without
spending time, this means that it would have taken the light rays which we now
see more than six months to cover the enormous distance from the earth, even
though they travel at the rate of 299,800 kilometers per second! It also means
that if we had a marvellously good telescope and could see details of events
on earth, the events we watched would be those that happened more than six
months ago!
1 cm. in picture = 1016 cm. = 100,000,000,000 km. Scale=1:1016
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