[Florin_Andrei]

Yeah, the energy issue is really, really tough. Stars are very, very, very freakingly far away.

I'm in California. If the whole Earth was this 2mm breadcrumb, then the Sun would be a soccer ball 25m away (across the street). Speed of light would be the speed of a running ant. Uranus would be a peanut 1/2km away.

And the nearest star would be another soccer ball somewhere in Greenland.

It. Just. Boggles. The. Mind.

http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...

I look up at the sky often. Those specks of light are so incredibly far away. We just need new physics, otherwise we'll never get there.

I'm an amateur astronomer and telescope maker, on a quest to see what's the biggest aperture that an amateur could build working alone. I can't go to the stars, but I can bring them a few hundred to a few thousand times closer to the eye.

[lifeisstillgood]

I have to say I love the "speed of a running ant" analogy. It really emphasises the size of the universe.

But can an ant run 25m in 8 minutes? I honestly can't imagine how fast an ant runs. That would be a foot in 4.8 secs - that's a fast ant actually. But I guess close.

[Florin_Andrei]

> It really emphasises the size of the universe.

Here's another comparo:

If your average galaxy was the size of a coin, the size of the observable universe would be on the order of a large town.

[Florin_Andrei]

50mm/sec - yeah, it would have to be one of those bigger ants I saw sometimes outside in the summer, hiding in crevices in the sidewalk, while I was growing up in Eastern Europe.

[dalke]

http://www.asu.edu/clas/sirgtools/ecology-1991.pdf says that Pogonomyrmex rugosus travels at 0.1914 * T - 1.983 meters per minute, for ground temperatures T (in C) between 20 and 40. This is roughly 3.8 m/minute or 60 mm/sec.

The equation for Messor pergandei is 0.0878 * T - 0.1724 or roughly 40 mm/sec.

So 50 mm/sec seems quite possible.

[lifeisstillgood]

I have just realised this conversation has become about the average speed of an unladen ant, European or Otherwise.

[dalke]

Both laden and unladen, in the paper I linked to. ;)