An interactive voyage · no spaceship required
How far can you go?
Below you is everything you know. Above you is everything else. This page is to real scale in time and wonder — every stop is a real place, at its real distance. Scroll to begin.
Altitude 0 km · stop 1 of 13
You are here
Home
Every astronaut who ever flew, every message ever sent, every person you have ever heard of — all of it comes from this thin blue layer of air and rock. Scroll up. Let’s leave.
Current speed: sitting still. Technically also 107,000 km/h around the Sun.
100 km up · stop 2 of 13
The Kármán line — space officially begins
100 km
If Earth were an apple, all the air we can breathe would be thinner than its skin. Above this line, the sky is black at noon and your blood would boil without a suit.
A car driving straight up at highway speed would be in space in under an hour.
408 km up · stop 3 of 13
The International Space Station
408 km
A laboratory the size of a football field, falling around the world every 92 minutes. The crew watches 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every single day.
A rocket gets here in about 8 minutes 48 seconds.
35,786 km up · stop 4 of 13
The geostationary ring
35,786 km
At exactly this height, a satellite orbits at the same rate Earth spins — so it hangs frozen over one spot forever. Weather and TV satellites live here, parked in the sky.
Radio waves take a quarter of a second to bounce here and back — the awkward delay in old satellite interviews.
384,400 km · stop 5 of 13
The Moon
384,400 km
The gap between Earth and the Moon is so vast that all seven other planets of the solar system could line up inside it, side by side — and still fit.
Light: 1.3 seconds. Apollo astronauts: 3 days. Still the farthest any human has ever been.
1 astronomical unit · stop 6 of 13
The Sun
149.6 million km
You could pour 1.3 million Earths inside it and still have room. The Sun is 99.86% of all the mass in the solar system — everything else, including us, is leftovers.
Light: 8 minutes 20 seconds. A passenger jet flying non-stop: 19 years.
The last planet · stop 7 of 13
Neptune
4.35 billion km
Winds here scream at 2,000 km/h — the fastest in the solar system — around a planet found not by telescope but by pure mathematics, before anyone had ever seen it.
Light: 4 hours. Voyager 2 needed 12 years to make the trip.
The farthest human-made thing · stop 8 of 13
Voyager 1
25 billion km
Launched in 1977 with less computing power than a car key, it is now in interstellar space — and still calling home. It carries a golden record of Earth’s sounds, just in case.
Its radio whispers take nearly a full day to reach us, travelling at the speed of light.
The solar system’s true edge · stop 9 of 13
The Oort cloud
~1.5 light-years
A shell of trillions of sleeping comets, so far out that the Sun is just the brightest star in the sky. This — not Pluto — is where the Sun’s kingdom actually ends.
Voyager 1, the fastest thing we ever aimed outward, will need about 30,000 years to cross it.
4.25 light-years · stop 10 of 13
Proxima Centauri
4.25 light-years
The very nearest star to home — a small red sun with a rocky planet in its habitable zone. It is too faint to see with your naked eye, yet it is our closest neighbour in the galaxy.
Voyager’s speed would get you here in roughly 75,000 years. Pack accordingly.
26,000 light-years · stop 11 of 13
The heart of the Milky Way
26,000 light-years
A black hole weighing 4 million Suns — Sagittarius A* — anchors our galaxy. Every star you have ever seen orbits it, including ours: one lap takes 230 million years.
The light arriving from here tonight left during the last ice age.
2.5 million light-years · stop 12 of 13
The Andromeda galaxy
2.5 million light-years
A trillion stars, and the farthest thing your naked eye can see from a dark field. It is racing toward us at 110 km/s — in about 4.5 billion years, our two galaxies will become one.
The light hitting your eye tonight left Andromeda before humans existed.
46.5 billion light-years · stop 13 of 13
The edge of the observable universe
46.5 billion light-years
Two trillion galaxies fit inside this sphere. This is not the end of the universe — only the end of what light has had time to show us. Beyond it, space almost certainly keeps going.
The oldest light here has been travelling for 13.8 billion years — since the universe was a newborn.
Now turn around.
From the edge of everything, Earth is far too small to see. Every war, every love story, every headline — all of it happened on a dot too tiny to notice. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” — Carl Sagan