What If The United States Were On The Moon?
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When we think of objects in space (not the last episode of Firefly), we often think about them in terms of grandness to the scale of Earth. Maybe we think about them in this way because they are so far away and we’re so small in comparison, but we never seem to think about them in terms of relative size. We all know the Earth is much bigger than the Moon, but how big is the Moon when compared to the United States of America? Here’s the answer…
The image comes from reddit where a user took the opportunity to put the Moon in perspective to the United States. The greatest distance between the two farthest points of the continental United States stretching from Point Arena, California to West Quoddy Head, Maine is 2,892 miles. In relation to the circumference of the Moon, which is 6,784 miles, the map of the United States would look something like the image above when compared to the Moon in scale. Reddit user boredboarder8 overlaid the two images to give their approximation.
It’s interesting to think about how small the Moon is in comparison to the United States, or in contrast, how big America is to the Moon. Again, this is a rough approximation but it looks good to compare the two. If this inspires some sort of American patriotism, please consider that there are other countries on this planet that are much bigger than the U.S., namely Russia, Canada, and China. But it’s nice to get some perspective on outer space, its celestial bodies, and how we fit into the universe. It’s a great big universe and we’re all really puny…
