A beautiful thing

This video is a work of art, both a “how we did it” and “wow! factor” at the same time. I’ve seen other representations of the solar system to scale, but they’ve all been on city streets or across the countryside.

With this piece, you see not only the linear distance but the entire system. To give you an idea of the size of the model, here’s an aerial view of Burning Man, which takes place in the same location, i.e., Black Rock Desert:

image from Wikipedia Commons

Black Rock City is three miles across, a little wider than Manhattan. The solar system model is seven miles across, twice the size of Burning Man.

This was an amazing thing to accomplish. For a look at their process, see here.

For a meditation on the same kind of thing, see my blog post here.

And for Lichtenbergians, the key takeaway is the reason these guys did it: “Because it’s never been done before, and we felt like it.”