tinychaseSpace kiosks · how far, how long
The Long Way There
Every destination we know of, laid on one line from the Moon to the far side of the galaxy, with the time it takes to get there in the fastest things we have built or seriously drawn up. Pick a ship and a span of years you can spare, and the line shows how far that gets you and how many of the known planets fall inside it. Fair warning: most of the line is out of reach of everything.
Distance on a log scale, so each gridline is ten times the last. The blue strip is every known planet by distance, 46 bins. Hover a rung.
The nearest fourteen systems
By the ship you picked. Rows in blue hold a small temperate world, which is not the same as a habitable one.
The one-gravity ship
Accelerate at 1 g to the halfway mark, turn round, decelerate. The passengers feel Earth's gravity the whole way, and for the crew the trip is short: time on board falls behind time at home the faster you go. This is a real consequence of special relativity and an entirely unreal engine.
Home time and ship time
Both on log scales. The lines part where the ship nears light speed, about a year out.
The weather when you land
Every world in the solar system with a real atmosphere, as measured. Pressure in Earth atmospheres, temperature in degrees Celsius.
Mars, from the ground
Air temperature at the landers that carried a weather station, lowest to highest sol reading, with the mean marked. Chryse and Utopia are Viking country; Jezero is Perseverance's crater.
Data: TerraPulse exoplanet dex (NASA Exoplanet Archive) for the distance of every confirmed planet, exported 2026-09-27; planetary_atmosphere (NSSDC fact sheets) for the ten atmospheres; planetary_weather_station dossiers for the Mars lander series summaries. Solar-system rungs are reference distances: Mars at its 2003 closest approach, Jupiter and Neptune at mean opposition, Voyager 1 at 168 AU in 2026, the Oort cloud's inner edge at 2,000 AU. Ships: Voyager 1 at 17 km/s relative to the Sun; Parker Solar Probe at 191 km/s, its 2024 perihelion speed and the fastest any human object has moved; a Breakthrough Starshot sail at its design goal of 20 percent of light speed, which has not been built; a one-gravity ship, which cannot be, with times from the relativistic rocket equations. Constant-speed times ignore the years it takes to reach speed and the fact that Parker only reaches its record speed by falling toward the Sun. Light-years to a star are also years for its light to reach us, so the Earth-time column is never less than that.