#HTE

Video Visualizations: If the Solar System’s Planets Were Closer to Earth

What happens when an astronomy enthusiast develops Autodesk 3ds Max skills? YouTube user Yeti Dynamics uses the program to create solar system “What if’s,” depicting what our sky would look like with alternate planetary configurations. First up, here’s his visualization of some of the planets fancifully relocated to be the same distance as our moon:

This is what the same might look like at night, and here he’s given one of Saturn’s moons a more terrifying orbit:

Now we all know that if the planets were actually that close to us, it would spell our doom; the reduced distance would make it much easier for the aliens living on those planets to reach us, and once they landed, their frantic pyramid-building would use up all of our resources. (Also, something about the tides, radiation and volcanoes.)

Our moon, on the other hand, does not have any aliens. Because we eradicated them during the secret second and third moon landings in 1974 and 1985. Anyways here’s what the moon would look like if it was the same distance away as the International Space Station:

So, is the science accurate? “Everything is correctly scaled,” claims Yeti Dynamics, though he cedes that “the Axial tilts are not particularly accurate.”

Not helping his scientific credibility is this example of what happens when, we assume, you import the wrong file into your visualization: