An xkcd comic on a size comparison that is unhelpful

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Randall Munroe’s xkcd webcomic for February 3, 2023 titled Size Comparisons is shown above (with color added by me). The dialogue says:

 

Cueball: “Texas is so big that if you expanded it to the size of the solar system, the ants there would be as big as Rhode Island.”

 

Ponytail: Wow!

                 …Wait.

 

Enlarging the state takes the comparison in the wrong direction. (Pluto is about 3.7 billion miles from the sun, so that's about 4,620,000 times). To make that size comprehensible it instead should be shrunk down to a more human scale. (Back on July 12, 2016 I blogged about How to make statistics understandable).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Wikipedia, as shown above, Texas is 773 miles wide by 801 miles high. If you drove  on I-10 from El Paso east to Beaumont, it would take you about 11.7 hours to go 833 miles. If we shrank Texas by 42,000 times, then it would become roughly 100 feet across (97.2 feet wide by 100.7 feet high). For comparison, a basketball court is 94 feet by 50 feet.

 

Wikipedia has a web page about Solar System models. There is one in Boulder, Colorado at the Fiske Planetarium with the following description:

 

“The Colorado Scale Model Solar System depicts the Sun, the planets, and the distances between them all on the same scale of 1 to 10 billion. That is, real objects and distances are 10 billion times larger than objects and distances in the model.

 

On this scale, Sun is about the size of a large grapefruit, while the Earth is the size of the ball point in a pen. It’s 15 big steps from the Sun to Earth, about 75 yards to marble-size Jupiter, and less than a half-mile walk to Pluto, the most distant object shown in the model.”   

 

The Texas map with counties came from Wikimedia Commons.