The main canal-side car park is located close to the northern (i.e. Bridgwater-side) model of Mars. I walked from there past Earth, Venus and Mercury to the Sun, and then past another Mercury, Venus and Earth to the Taunton-side Mars. That involves a total distance of just 860 metres. I then walked on another kilometre to Jupiter, before returning to the car and driving into Taunton, where I “finished” the trail at Pluto, 11.3 km from the Sun (the model dates from 1997, when Pluto was still counted as one of the planets). My photos above show the six planets I visited on the Taunton side of the Sun.
The model really does put “astronomical scales” into perspective. The picture below shows the relatively huge model of the Sun, with the hundred-times-smaller model of the Earth in the inset. The latter is a stainless steel sphere approximately 25 mm in diameter. On that scale, the International Space Station would be a mere 0.75 mm above the surface of the sphere. The Moon, which is the furthest anyone has travelled, would be just a metre away. The nearest star outside the Solar System, Alpha Centauri, would be about 77,000 km away – almost six times the diameter of the real Earth!
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Those models also demonstrate how ridiculous the idea of interstellar travel is. Even if it were possible to travel at the speed of light it would take FOUR YEARS to reach the nearest star. In the original Star Trek series the Enterprise is on a "five year mission" so at the speed of light that would be halfway to Alpha Centauri and back again !! Which means that the Enterprise and all the other Trek starships must be travelling at thousands of times the speed of light or they'd never get anywhere. Even if we could manage just one per cent of light speed it would take 150 seconds to reach the moon (compared to four days for Neil Armstrong) but 400 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Sadly this means that those sci-fi stories and films involving starships travelling to different planets in a vast galactic empire/federation will always remain mere fantasy :(
You're quite right, Colin. But fiction has always been demand-driven, not science-driven. In the 19th century, there was an enormously popular genre of "lost world" adventure novels, in which characters encountered strange and exotic creatures and civilizations in unexplored parts of Africa, South America etc. Then after those places were fully explored, there was still a huge audience demand for that kind of adventure, so authors carried on churning it out but transplanted the action to Mars, Venus etc. Unfortunately it quickly became clear that those planets were completely unsuitable for life, so they were effectively forced to write about travel to other star systems -- regardless of the feasibility, practicality or desirability of interstellar travel. It's just that writers needed a suitable venue for a perennially popular type of adventure story.
Talking of spaceships, Andrew - I've just bought the latest Fortean Times and I never knew that "World Contact Day" was an annual event. I know the phrase because of the Carpenters' song "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" with the line "We declare World Contact Day" but I always assumed it was a one-off event organized by the international astronomy community or something. FT also has a feature asking why do alien spaceships always crash on Earth - an excellent question which had never occurred to me before !
I've seen the question posed on at least a couple of occasions before, but the answer in FT (that the aliens send all their "learner drivers" here) is an amusing and original one.
Unlike you I hadn't heard of World Contact Day, even as a one-off event - or if I had, it went in one ear and out the other (in fact I'd barely heard of Albert K. Bender, in whose obituary it was mentioned). It sounds like a very wacky idea!
Just to be clear - the full (and very long) title of that Carpenters song was "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft (The Official Anthem Of World Contact Day" which made me think that World Contact Day was some kind of big event if it had an "official anthem". It sounded like the kind of thing that Carl Sagan would organize - he believed the galaxy was full of alien civilisations.
On your side I found pictures from the Somerset Space Walk.
Please give me permission to use your pictures on my homepage.
http://planetenwege.u-dreher.de/uk/ta7_sommersettaunton.html
Udo
Very sorry that it took me 5 years to notice this comment! If you're still interested, do please use my photos (with an acknowledgement) if you're still interested.
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