Earth

Begin with the small blue world. At our starting scale, you could cover it with a coin. Somewhere on the real one, you are holding a screen and looking back at home.

Let it drift out of view.

The next world takes longer to arrive than you expect. Then longer still. There is no missing illustration in the gap. That is the illustration.

The Sun, at this same scale, is nearly ten thousand pixels wide. Yet more than a million pixels separate its centre from Earth. Even sunlight needs about eight minutes to make that crossing. The warmth on your face has been travelling.

Farther out, the familiar names become small interruptions in the dark. Jupiter. Saturn. Neptune. Whole worlds, with storms and seasons and moons of their own, briefly passing through the narrow window of your hand.

And all of this is still our neighbourhood. Beyond these markers lie the distant reaches of the Sun’s domain. Beyond them, other stars, separated by years of light. Our galaxy holds them in a sweep too vast for this little journey to suggest. Beyond our galaxy are other galaxies.

A screen has edges. Space offers no such reassurance.

We have kept the worlds and the distances between them on one scale, but borrowed freely from time. We hurry through the emptiness so that you can reach the next small wonder before you put your phone down. Even here, in this modest corner of the universe, an honest journey asks more patience than a little app can reasonably expect.

We can put a number on a distance long before we can feel it. Perhaps that is what this small experiment is for: to let the numbers become, for a moment, a little astonishment.

Then come back to Earth. It has not grown any larger.
There is still room on it for everyone you love.