1 HN user recommended this documentary1 month2015–2025score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Shared as the best visceral demonstration of solar system scale.
A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.
“a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System” (HN, 2025)
This is a great website—it reminds me of To Scale: The Solar System [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere... [1] [this video]
Mini-documentary building a true-to-scale solar system model.
It's walkable, but you can't see the "sun" from the "earth," and it's walkable in well more than an hour, at which point I don't think that you're really keeping the scale in mind. We can always look at images or whatever if we want to get an intellectual sense of the scale of things. I think the advantage of a model is that you feel immersed in it, and I don't think you do at this scale. It's challenging! It's hard to find a location and a scale which gives you this human sense of the sizes involved. At most scales, you have to make the planets pinpricks in size. But, especially for the inner system, you can make it work. EDIT: Here's I think something that works. [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more