QQC 2

“Now the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful. Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuffin it-the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt comets, and other miscellaneous drifting detritus-fills less than a trillionth of the available space. You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system were remotely drawn to scale. Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals-the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations-but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter-five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.”

This quote caught my attention because the way it explained our solar system was crazy to believe. Our solar system is really humongous, and yet some how I've always seen the earth as a big place it's self. Reading this passage makes me realize that earth and our universe is really tiny compared to Our solar system. It'd be really crazy to find life on another planet... This makes me wonder, Is there another planet similar to earth that people will be able to live on in the future? Who knows.

I wonder if there are other creatures in different planets that we don't know about. What if there was a new planet that was unknown beyond the moon? Maybe years from now some astronauts will discover my answer. But for now the answer remains unknown.

QQC

"I didn't know if the oceans were growing more salty with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned about or not"
I like how this article presented Bill Bryson's ideas with lots of questions, then explanations. The article made me curious and opened minded about these things in life. The quote above was the one I chose because, Bill explained it and then went deeper into the science aspect of it.