The solar system is mostly empty space

Your school textbooks lied to you by squashing the planets together to fit on a single page. If you built a scale model where the Sun was the size of a grapefruit, the Earth would be a tiny grain of salt located 50 feet away.

Neptune, the outermost planet, would be another grain of salt orbiting two miles down the road. The space between these tiny specks isn't just empty; it is a vacuum so profound that the solar system is 99.9999999999999% nothingness.

Most people visualize the asteroid belt as a crowded minefield of tumbling rocks. In reality, if you stood on an asteroid, you wouldn't see your nearest neighbor because it would be hundreds of thousands of miles away, hidden in the dark.

If you removed all the planets, moons, and asteroids, the solar system would look almost exactly the same. The Sun contains 99.8% of all the mass in our neighborhood, leaving every world you've ever heard of as a mere rounding error in a cosmic void.

Light, the fastest thing in existence, takes eight minutes just to cross the gap from the Sun to your eyes. To reach the far edge of the Oort Cloud-the icy shell surrounding our system-that same light would have to travel for over a year and a half.

Even the "solid" matter of the planets is an illusion of scale. Atoms themselves are mostly empty space; if you removed the empty space from the atoms of every human on Earth, the entire population's mass would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

We are tiny ghosts living on a speck of dust, drifting through a cathedral of silence that is still expanding.