Now the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. 你可能首先意识到，空间这个名字起得极其恰当，空间是个平淡无奇的地方。

Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it 在几万亿公里范围内，最充满生气的要算我们的太阳系，而所有可看得见的东西

the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid¹ belt, comets, 太阳、行星及其卫星、小行星带的上亿块翻滚的岩石、彗星

and other miscellaneous drifting detritus² 和别的各种飘浮的碎石

fills less than a trillionth of the available space. 仅仅充满不足现有空间的万亿分之一。

You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn³ to scale. 你还很快意识到，你所见到的太阳系图是根本不按比例制作的。

Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals⁴ 在教室里的大多数图上，行星们一颗挨着一颗，相距很近

the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations 在许多插图里，外侧巨星的影子实际上落在彼此身上

but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. 但是，为了把所有的行星画在同一张纸上，这种骗术也是必不可少的。

Neptune⁵ in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter 海王星其实不是在土星以外一点儿，而是在土星以外很远的地方

five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, 它离土星的距离比土星离我们的距离还要远5倍。

so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter. 它在外面那么遥远的地方，接受的阳光只有土星的3％。

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. 实际上，距离是那么遥远，无论如何不可能按比例来画太阳系图。

Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks 即使你在教科书里增加许许多多折页，

or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close. 或者使用长得不得了的标语纸，你也无法接近这个比例。

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, 在一张成比例的太阳系图上，如果将地球的直径缩小到大约一粒豆子的直径，

Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto⁶ would be a mile and a half distant 土星便会在300多米以外，冥王星会在2.5公里外的远处

and about the size of a bacterium⁷, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway. 约为一个细菌的大小，因此你怎么也看不见它。

On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away. 按照同样的比例，离我们最近的恒星比邻星会在1.6万公里以外。

Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the period at the end of this sentence, 即使你把一切都加以缩小，土星会像英文的句点那么小，

and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule⁸, Pluto would still be over thirty-five feet away. 冥王星不超过分子的个儿，那么冥王星依然在10多米以外。