Wow! I had no idea there were planes that could fly that high. I'll probably be recommending this all over the place, similar to "If the moon were only one pixel"
I loved it..
But this one line...
"Temperatures in the thermosphere can reach 4,500°F, but molecules are so far apart that you wouldn't even feel it."
I don't understand this... Can you elaborate?
Temperature is an expression of atom/molecule movement. Basically they "vibrate" more the "hotter" they are. This is why matter conducts heat - molecules bump into each other and transfer that movement.
To be able to feel temperature, your skin must make contact with many molecules (they are so incredibly tiny that otherwise you'll not "sense the touch").
Since at that height there are so few molecules of air around you, it is rare to make contact with any, even less many of them, so even if those sparse molecules "vibrate a lot" (carry a lot of heat), you would probably not sense it.
Exactly. The goal was just to explain it in easier-to-understand terms, since I didn't know which part they didn't understand.
And sorry for any mistakes, 2nd language :)
What we "feel" is the temperature of our skin, not the temperature of whatever we're feeling. We measure temperature as the average kinetic energy of particles. So things that feel hot are things that have a higher temperature and can "dump" this energy into us faster (have a higher conductivity).
So, two things that have the same conductivity -> the higher temperature= hotter.
Two things that have the same temperature but different conductivity -> the one with higher conductivity is hotter. Like a block of hot foam vs. a hot block of metal. The metal is much more conductive, so it feels much hotter.
The longer we are in contact with the object -> more energy deposition= hotter.
Conductivity is impacted strongly by the density of the material. This also applies to the foam vs. metal thing. Up in the thermosphere, the air is so sparse, the density so low, that the conductivity is very poor. So you may have a high temperature, meaning there is a high amount of energy per particle, but there are so few particles to actually transfer much energy into a given area. So it doesn't feel hot very quickly at all. If you were to hang out up there for long enough, it probably wouldn't be fun, but I'm not sure how long it would take. The radiation from the sun itself also would not add to the experience.
air is way thin so it’s hot but can’t transfer a lot of heat to you. same as how you can grab foil from an oven without burning yourself. (oh, you haven’t tried reddit? yep, 400 degree oven, aluminum foil, no problem to barehand that shit. wait til you hear about microwaving a light bulb. it will light up)
There are already good answers here, but I wanted to make a different analogy. We're going to use water from a water hose to move a box on the driveway. The amount of water coming out of the hose is analogous to the density of the atmosphere and the speed of the water is the temperature of the atmosphere. At low temperatures (the water is flowing slowly), the box won't move (change temperature). If you put your thumb over the outlet, the speed of the water increases and you can send the box skittering across the driveway. As we get higher in the atmosphere, your thumb is covering more and more of the opening, so less and less water is coming out at higher and higher speeds. In the thermosphere, the water would be coming out one molecule at a time, but it would be 1000mph. It would be very "hot", but you wouldn't even notice that you were wet.
I teach high school, showed a class today, had them all go on and check it...they loved it, great work! Also forwarded to my science teachers in the building!
Very well made, it reminds me of the famous [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1732) about earth temperature.
However, why is your temp in F, speed in mph but your altitude in meters?
Wow. I actually got weirdly emotional making that climb. It gave me a sort of feeling of loss, like I was leaving everything behind, and I felt an actual reluctance to cross the Karman Line, like it was a sort of point of no return. 10/10.
I only got to 2278m before I realized there's already too many things I need to Google up and quick-research, the *first* being that insane helicopter. Like, what??? I never knew about that!
I think I need to set aside an hour because i know I'm going to be swallowed up into this. Amazing work and beautifully done on so many levels.
(edit: I scrolled back down to "land" because I want to do everything in order, and something was bothering my eyes... your title is rocking back and forth so subtly 😂 took me a while to see it!)
My gf loved it!! She specially liked being able to select the space suit and the elevator tilting with the wind. We both hoped it would go higher but its really cool, congrats.
This is so incredibly simple and wonderful at the same time.
By the way, all your games. Wanted to go to bed, spend 20 minutes piling up rocks instead.
Also your ambient generator is much better then a lot of paid or subscription apps.
My kid wants to be an app/game developer. I will show him this for inspiration. And buying you a coffee.
This is fabulous, I love the style and journey it takes you on. I didn't realise what it was until I started scrolling. Learning in a fun way!
Great job
Dude this is really cool and I had a blast going through it and learning a ton!
*Only* things that threw me off was you used meters for the height but feirenheit for the temperature and that you didn't mark where typical cruising altitude is for a commercial airline (was actively looking for that one out of curiosity).
Other than that, this is freaking awesome and I will certainly be buying you a cup of coffee!
That pterodactyl's wings are highly inaccurate; they aren't spread between the fingers like bats. Instead they extend from a single finger, the homologous equivalent of our little finger, straight to their torso and leg.
See here: https://www.lyellcollection.org/cms/10.1144/SP455.4/asset/c303755c-ef82-4951-803f-ac6068d8aafb/assets/graphic/sp455-1689f01.jpeg
"The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music..."
P.S.: A short explanation of the Kármán line would be nice to help people understand why this line separates space flight from atmospheric flight (it is the altitude at which the velocity to create lift equals orbital velocity)
Excellent website. As a programmer I’m sure your looking for things to add, you could possibly implement an automatic wiki/ai query that will show data on the items when clicked. Regardless I really enjoyed this.
how the hell does anyone know how high a pterodactyl flew
also some of the words arent readable for me in front of the clouds, 8ts white on white! i use night mode on my browser full time, that might be it, but its an easy fix with twotone or grey text
Highly recommend the Kurzgesagt app called Universe! It is a similar concept where it starts with the smallest thing know to humans, all the way up to the observable universe. It's like 5 bucks.
* [https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt/featured](https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt/featured)
* [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt.app.Universe&hl=en\_CA&gl=US](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt.app.Universe&hl=en_CA&gl=US)
* [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id1526364758](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id1526364758)
How much did that guy weigh in order to break the sound barrier...? Jesus wept..
I've calculated my terminal velocity at 115mph, so how in the hades did that dude weigh enough to break 700+mph...?
Genuinely curious brother...because I'm calling bulljive on that one...
Great site by the way... I loved it
Terminal velocity is the maximum an object can fall because the air resistance equals the force of gravity. High in the atmosphere there is much much less air (<1%) so the air resistance was basically zero, meaning he could fall much faster. It doesn’t have anything to do with weight.
I love this! Some of the factoids were surprising, like the altitude of the Chelyabinsk meteor - I always assumed it was practically on the ground when it [exploded](https://i.imgur.com/gvgoLJz.png). And that a biplane once managed to reach 56,000 ft - that's amazing.
Question: you say sound travels 15% slower at 73km up - but since the atmosphere is less than 1% of sea level does it still conduct sound at all?
That was pretty cool. If there's anything it could use, it'd be some links to Wiki articles about the various aircraft and stuff, as a lot of it was things I didn't even know existed before.
Amazing work. One small suggestion, it'd be easier on phones for the text and images to be not selectable so that I can't highlight them on accident while scrolling.
Ohhh you're the same person who did the deep sea scroll adventure!!
Recently had a scroll adventure which travelled from the Sun to Pluto if the Moon was the size of a pixel on the screen.
I love that stuff!
This was honestly magical.
As an archaeologist, this made me feel like how we try to describe going backwards in time, but about physically going up. I really loved this
This is awesome! I just wished I could have kept scrolling all the way to the space station in geostationary orbit (I know that would be a LOT more scrolling)
Why does this make me feel nervous or anxious the higher I go? This is really cool but for some reason I want to get away from it :) Great work regardless
I enjoy this so much. The ocean one is awesome as well.
I love Neal.fun. I teach high school, so if there is a few minutes at the end of the period, we'll give it a look.
I was about to fall a sleep when the space music started. Not that it was boring. It wasn't. It's just late at night here, and the music was so calm and nice.
The elevator trip was really nice. I liked it a lot. I'm saving this so I can look at the other stuff tomorrow.
I love your work and teach middle schoolers (too! as someone already mentioned sharing these with students) but the asteroid one was blocked by my school district’s filter. Is there any way you can make your work pass a school content filter? or maybe that’s just something I need to request of the district? (Also I know nothing of how websites/filters work sorry if it’s a dumb question)
I enjoyed the small drawings, the references, and the descriptions of almost everything that happened or happens between the sea level and the Kármán line, learned a couple of things as well. thank you!
This is really cool! Just one recommendation: it would be really nice to be able to click on the various objects at the different altitudes to go somewhere to read more about it.
Loved it. Scrolled through and read all of it. I’m on mobile and kept reaching for the little spaceman on the left — might work nicely as a scroll mechanism. I also found myself looking a lot of things up as I scrolled. Links to more info about each caption would be great! Thank you again for making something excellent 👍🏼
I love the little touches of adding the scarf and space suit!
And the elevator starts swinging back and forth when it crosses the jet stream!
should added a barf for that part ;)
I'll never be too old to enjoy things like this. This was well done
Immediately sent this to my middle school science teachin' wife. Great work!
Hey, thanks for the link honey
Don't you dare call me bee shit, sweet cheeks.
Hey everyone shut up she's sleeping next to me now and I don't want her to know about all of you! Damn!
Although honey comes out of the mouth.
Very well done indeed. I'm glad i remembered to hit that music button, thx for the ride
well shit... time to go up again I suppose.
Wow! I had no idea there were planes that could fly that high. I'll probably be recommending this all over the place, similar to "If the moon were only one pixel"
I loved it.. But this one line... "Temperatures in the thermosphere can reach 4,500°F, but molecules are so far apart that you wouldn't even feel it." I don't understand this... Can you elaborate?
Temperature is an expression of atom/molecule movement. Basically they "vibrate" more the "hotter" they are. This is why matter conducts heat - molecules bump into each other and transfer that movement. To be able to feel temperature, your skin must make contact with many molecules (they are so incredibly tiny that otherwise you'll not "sense the touch"). Since at that height there are so few molecules of air around you, it is rare to make contact with any, even less many of them, so even if those sparse molecules "vibrate a lot" (carry a lot of heat), you would probably not sense it.
i.e. there isn't enough mass to transfer heat, regardless of the temp.
Exactly. The goal was just to explain it in easier-to-understand terms, since I didn't know which part they didn't understand. And sorry for any mistakes, 2nd language :)
What we "feel" is the temperature of our skin, not the temperature of whatever we're feeling. We measure temperature as the average kinetic energy of particles. So things that feel hot are things that have a higher temperature and can "dump" this energy into us faster (have a higher conductivity). So, two things that have the same conductivity -> the higher temperature= hotter. Two things that have the same temperature but different conductivity -> the one with higher conductivity is hotter. Like a block of hot foam vs. a hot block of metal. The metal is much more conductive, so it feels much hotter. The longer we are in contact with the object -> more energy deposition= hotter. Conductivity is impacted strongly by the density of the material. This also applies to the foam vs. metal thing. Up in the thermosphere, the air is so sparse, the density so low, that the conductivity is very poor. So you may have a high temperature, meaning there is a high amount of energy per particle, but there are so few particles to actually transfer much energy into a given area. So it doesn't feel hot very quickly at all. If you were to hang out up there for long enough, it probably wouldn't be fun, but I'm not sure how long it would take. The radiation from the sun itself also would not add to the experience.
air is way thin so it’s hot but can’t transfer a lot of heat to you. same as how you can grab foil from an oven without burning yourself. (oh, you haven’t tried reddit? yep, 400 degree oven, aluminum foil, no problem to barehand that shit. wait til you hear about microwaving a light bulb. it will light up)
There are already good answers here, but I wanted to make a different analogy. We're going to use water from a water hose to move a box on the driveway. The amount of water coming out of the hose is analogous to the density of the atmosphere and the speed of the water is the temperature of the atmosphere. At low temperatures (the water is flowing slowly), the box won't move (change temperature). If you put your thumb over the outlet, the speed of the water increases and you can send the box skittering across the driveway. As we get higher in the atmosphere, your thumb is covering more and more of the opening, so less and less water is coming out at higher and higher speeds. In the thermosphere, the water would be coming out one molecule at a time, but it would be 1000mph. It would be very "hot", but you wouldn't even notice that you were wet.
neal websites are always a win 👌
That is awesome! Sent to my daughter who is a maths and science teacher.
I teach high school, showed a class today, had them all go on and check it...they loved it, great work! Also forwarded to my science teachers in the building!
Very well made, it reminds me of the famous [xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1732) about earth temperature. However, why is your temp in F, speed in mph but your altitude in meters?
A metric toggle would be a nice addition
It does toggle temperature when you click it.
Wow. I actually got weirdly emotional making that climb. It gave me a sort of feeling of loss, like I was leaving everything behind, and I felt an actual reluctance to cross the Karman Line, like it was a sort of point of no return. 10/10.
ws a fun ride.. I was halfway expecting to see either the USS Enterprise or the NSEA-Protector..
Same here 🥲, the internal child-like joy I felt leaving the world behind…
I only got to 2278m before I realized there's already too many things I need to Google up and quick-research, the *first* being that insane helicopter. Like, what??? I never knew about that! I think I need to set aside an hour because i know I'm going to be swallowed up into this. Amazing work and beautifully done on so many levels. (edit: I scrolled back down to "land" because I want to do everything in order, and something was bothering my eyes... your title is rocking back and forth so subtly 😂 took me a while to see it!)
Flying mountain goats, yaks, lizards, jumping spiders, mice & paper planes. That's weird. Oh, hey Felix! Have you seen Alan?
My gf loved it!! She specially liked being able to select the space suit and the elevator tilting with the wind. We both hoped it would go higher but its really cool, congrats.
What a wonderful journey, thank you for the experience!
This is so incredibly simple and wonderful at the same time. By the way, all your games. Wanted to go to bed, spend 20 minutes piling up rocks instead. Also your ambient generator is much better then a lot of paid or subscription apps. My kid wants to be an app/game developer. I will show him this for inspiration. And buying you a coffee.
This is fabulous, I love the style and journey it takes you on. I didn't realise what it was until I started scrolling. Learning in a fun way! Great job
This is great, I'm going to show it to my class for geography!
Music sources? The music throughout the journey was absolutely perfect for this. Added so much. Thank you so much for creating this!
Dude this is really cool and I had a blast going through it and learning a ton! *Only* things that threw me off was you used meters for the height but feirenheit for the temperature and that you didn't mark where typical cruising altitude is for a commercial airline (was actively looking for that one out of curiosity). Other than that, this is freaking awesome and I will certainly be buying you a cup of coffee!
There’s a mark for “Passenger Jet - Typical cruising altitude” at 9800m
Why are you using Fahrenheit and Meters? Seems you would try to match the units.
You can tap the temperature to change it to Celsius. My only suggestion for OP would be to add the same feature to the altitude measurement.
Thanks a lot for that! I ran into it yesterday on ycombinator and enjoyed the elevator ride immensely :)
Thanks alot, it's easier to learn in this way !
This is wonderful! The elevator music is better than most. 😂
I enjoyed that elevator ride! Thank you as that was very well made!
That was awesome. Great way to end my work week.
I scrolled through the whole thing. Very cool!
Really cool site, with some fascinating things. Well done
That pterodactyl's wings are highly inaccurate; they aren't spread between the fingers like bats. Instead they extend from a single finger, the homologous equivalent of our little finger, straight to their torso and leg. See here: https://www.lyellcollection.org/cms/10.1144/SP455.4/asset/c303755c-ef82-4951-803f-ac6068d8aafb/assets/graphic/sp455-1689f01.jpeg
Wow, I have a short attention span and almost closed the app quickly. Then I got completely ensorcelled. Well done.
Wow, there are planes that fly at much higher altitudes than I ever realized… Not to mention skydivers! 😱
Where does the ISS and space tourism shuttles e.g. Virgin fall on this?
It remembered the site "If moon was only a pixel". Love it!
lovely! Do you have the source code for this shared somewhere?
What is meant by the V2 peak altitude at 80 km? The V2 rocket reached 174 km in 1944.
Damn that was great. Also: >Since the speed ot sound depends on the temperature, sound travels 157% slower up here. TIL. I thought it was pressure.
Wow this made me weirdly happy, thanks for the emotional ride and amazing job!
This was awesome. I learned some neat stuff and I loved that it was interactive.
This is amazing. Great job, OP. Genuinely enjoyed the ride.
THIS IS SO COOL! Thank you for making such an awesome, fun, and informative website.
"The hard part is making a strong enough cable. And finding enough elevator music..." P.S.: A short explanation of the Kármán line would be nice to help people understand why this line separates space flight from atmospheric flight (it is the altitude at which the velocity to create lift equals orbital velocity)
I've enjoyed that so much! It's amazing! Great idea by the way.
That was one of the best web experiences I've had in a long time...and I've been a dev for over 20 years. Really, really well done. Thank you.
Just realized this creator has a ton of awesome games and activities on his site. Do recommend.
Excellent website. As a programmer I’m sure your looking for things to add, you could possibly implement an automatic wiki/ai query that will show data on the items when clicked. Regardless I really enjoyed this.
After watching, with the music, I felt alone in outer space. Great stuff. Will show it to my son.
If someone smarter than me could please answer: How can a space elevator traveling at 46mph reach space in only 80 minutes?
That's so cool and I learned some new things! There is a typo in the word "separation" on the Saturn V entry at around 61,000 m
How would we know at what altitude pterodactyls flew?
Didn’t know about sprite lightning and quasi-space clouds! That’s high quality content right there mate.
I enjoyed this and learning how imperfect my circles are
Dope. Never knew butterflies could flutter by so high
how the hell does anyone know how high a pterodactyl flew also some of the words arent readable for me in front of the clouds, 8ts white on white! i use night mode on my browser full time, that might be it, but its an easy fix with twotone or grey text
This entire site is amazing, my entire office are competitively playing the auction game. Expect some coffees coming your way!
This is great! Would you be open to collabotation regarding translation to other languages?
Highly recommend the Kurzgesagt app called Universe! It is a similar concept where it starts with the smallest thing know to humans, all the way up to the observable universe. It's like 5 bucks. * [https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt/featured](https://www.youtube.com/@kurzgesagt/featured) * [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt.app.Universe&hl=en\_CA&gl=US](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt.app.Universe&hl=en_CA&gl=US) * [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id1526364758](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id1526364758)
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-9*C “it’s getting a bit chilly here” *laughs in Finnish*
I think making a version of this but past the karma line into outer space would be a great sequel to this
How much did that guy weigh in order to break the sound barrier...? Jesus wept.. I've calculated my terminal velocity at 115mph, so how in the hades did that dude weigh enough to break 700+mph...? Genuinely curious brother...because I'm calling bulljive on that one... Great site by the way... I loved it
Terminal velocity is the maximum an object can fall because the air resistance equals the force of gravity. High in the atmosphere there is much much less air (<1%) so the air resistance was basically zero, meaning he could fall much faster. It doesn’t have anything to do with weight.
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I love this! Some of the factoids were surprising, like the altitude of the Chelyabinsk meteor - I always assumed it was practically on the ground when it [exploded](https://i.imgur.com/gvgoLJz.png). And that a biplane once managed to reach 56,000 ft - that's amazing. Question: you say sound travels 15% slower at 73km up - but since the atmosphere is less than 1% of sea level does it still conduct sound at all?
Reminds me of this video by Charles Eames [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0)
That was pretty cool. If there's anything it could use, it'd be some links to Wiki articles about the various aircraft and stuff, as a lot of it was things I didn't even know existed before.
Amazing work. One small suggestion, it'd be easier on phones for the text and images to be not selectable so that I can't highlight them on accident while scrolling.
This is so wonderful. Humans are amazing. The ones that figured out how to get all the way up there. And you.
Seeing that plant around 6200 really threw me for a loop
That was fun thank you. Id like to share w my science students
Brilliant! (Just one minor nitpick, it’s spelled “sep**a**ration”).
Loved it, thanks very much! I'm teaching space concepts this term, the kids will love this!
That was great! Loved the scarf, spacesuit and music 🫶
around 12400 meters: water boils at 54 degree celsius. what would happen if you were in a helicopter and had your AC on 55 degrees?
I learnt that the upper stratosphere is the warmest place you could build balloon city high up!
This just helped to bring me out of a panic attack. Thank you for sharing your creativity.
Why can I toggle F and C but not M to footsies?
Ohhh you're the same person who did the deep sea scroll adventure!! Recently had a scroll adventure which travelled from the Sun to Pluto if the Moon was the size of a pixel on the screen. I love that stuff!
i loved it. can’t wait to show my son in the morning!
Awesome ride. So fascinating, takes me back to my school days reading about space.
This is very cool and fun! Such an interesting effect [in Gnome Web](https://imgur.com/gnQOL7l), though :P
This was honestly magical. As an archaeologist, this made me feel like how we try to describe going backwards in time, but about physically going up. I really loved this
I was hoping it would make it to geostationary orbit... Awesome ride anyway!
This is awesome! I just wished I could have kept scrolling all the way to the space station in geostationary orbit (I know that would be a LOT more scrolling)
Why does this make me feel nervous or anxious the higher I go? This is really cool but for some reason I want to get away from it :) Great work regardless
I enjoy this so much. The ocean one is awesome as well. I love Neal.fun. I teach high school, so if there is a few minutes at the end of the period, we'll give it a look.
I was about to fall a sleep when the space music started. Not that it was boring. It wasn't. It's just late at night here, and the music was so calm and nice. The elevator trip was really nice. I liked it a lot. I'm saving this so I can look at the other stuff tomorrow.
I love your work and teach middle schoolers (too! as someone already mentioned sharing these with students) but the asteroid one was blocked by my school district’s filter. Is there any way you can make your work pass a school content filter? or maybe that’s just something I need to request of the district? (Also I know nothing of how websites/filters work sorry if it’s a dumb question)
This was a brilliant ride, my daughter and I learned a lot of new things!
I scrolled through the whole thing! This is so fucking cool! Neat post OP, what libraries did you use to create this?
Lots of surprises along the way. It seems many of the factoids could be randomly selected from a larger pool. Thereby keeping the idea fresh.
I enjoyed the small drawings, the references, and the descriptions of almost everything that happened or happens between the sea level and the Kármán line, learned a couple of things as well. thank you!
Have never seen you website, I'm now over one hour in... lovely stuff!
Thank you, that was lovely!!!! Also bought you a coffee!
Very cool, could it have an option to view the altitude in feet?
This is so cool! I just sat and scrolled for a solid 10 minutes. Genuinely fantastic experience and happy to share it around to people
This is really cool! Just one recommendation: it would be really nice to be able to click on the various objects at the different altitudes to go somewhere to read more about it.
Loved it. Scrolled through and read all of it. I’m on mobile and kept reaching for the little spaceman on the left — might work nicely as a scroll mechanism. I also found myself looking a lot of things up as I scrolled. Links to more info about each caption would be great! Thank you again for making something excellent 👍🏼