The Real Stars and Scale of Sci-fi

Great video! As best as I can tell it's pronounced 'eck-you-men-op-oh-lis' though I used to pronounce it 'you-kuh-men-op-oh-lis' a lot.

A really enlightening overview, thank you very much. It also drive home the mindboggling size of the universe. If anything, I would have loved a final "zoom out" scene in the video that puts the various scales into perspective for one final time. Making Star Track and most other SciFi "regions" the little dots they really are.

Wolf 359 was an inside job.

You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Now come on. I don't even understand why people want to front like they cant pronounce phonetic syllables. I assume you can say these sounds:

eck
you
men
op
uh
lis

With a near perfect degree of accuracy? Do that, with no pauses.

What is great is that the Large Magellanic Cloud had recently been shown to be TWO galaxies itself!

A quick notable mention: The Large Megellanic Cloud is the destination of the Yamato from Space Battleship Yamato, the home of the Gamilon Empire, and of course the planet Iscandar.

Lol can he can say tetrahedron but not ecumonopolis

I’m holding you fully responsible for blowing my mind.

Truly awesome essay, really well presented and researched, thank you very much.

Look at "Elite Dangerous" map, it might be 100% or approximately actual scale.

Great Info But... How about Farscape, where did John Criton travel to?

Thanks for this, was incredibly cool and just makes me sad that none of these sci-fi shows were real 😞

If our Sol system Oort cloud extends 3 light years in all directions, then that would mean the Alpha Centauri Oort cloud probably overlaps/intermingles with ours, by as much as 1 light year.

what about the netflix series "Lost in Space"?

shame space battleship yamato didnt have any references to the greater magellenic cloud in this

All that discussion about Star Trek, but no mention of the battle at Wolf 359, the place where Ben Sisko lost his beloved wife, Jennifer, in the war against the Borg? Like, for realsies?

Starship Troopers may also have been intentionally hinting at official propaganda being nothing but lies, and claiming the enemy is from 100,000 light years away is so egregious a lie that it shows how much people are willing to eat up (sadly these days it has become a reality).
The Bug War (unlike in the books) was basically a big double decoy operation - first it galvanized people and made them forget about asking questions about the fascist regime they were living in, and it provided an opportunity for the state to get rid of all people in fighting age and condition (why would you send thousands to die on the ground when you have air superiority and can bomb the bugs back to the stone age before sending ground troops?).

place of the Yautja (Predators) and the a-holes of Independence Day? 🤔

I can appreciate Star Wars being a galaxy far far away in your thumbnail 😂

Bobiverse would be fantastic :)

The Honorverse by David Weber takes place across many Star Systems. In the main books, Epsilon Eridani is only mentioned as the site of humanity's worst massacre, in which 7 billion were killed. The Solarian League (centered on Earth) created the Eridani Edict against orbital bombardment of planets. The main story never goes to Epsilon Eridani.

Somewhere on that Diagram might be the Lost In Space people, Other Space and.....
....Captain Janeway. All She had to do was look at the Map. Or just ask directions, But No.

Since the Universe is constantly expanding, it would be "A Galaxy Further and Further away." If you were to travel there, by the time you got there it would already be moved and no longer in the location you expected. 🤔🕳📡

Glad you added Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is a great series sadly Season 5 was rushed due to cancellation which is why Season 5 of Andromeda felt bad or rushed.

I have to scoff a bit at the idea of "hard sciFi" because once we're talking about traveling to other stars, it's not any science we know of. One can suggest things like warp fields and wormholes but those are mathematical constructs, not observed phenomena. And even if they did exist, we know of no way to survive going through one. Rather, science tells us we would be torn into itty bitty bits and squished into something not resembling a life form. So we make up things like inertial dampeners which are no more real than The Force or infinity stones. **None of which should spoil a good story***. I love sciFi and enjoy a good space opera. I'm just saying let's not get too snobby about the idea of "hard sciFi".

I think the AI art kinda detracts from the video but whatever.

GET ON IT!

👍 👍

you forgot to mention Mesklin when you covered 61 Cygni

Have I been pronouncing Ursula Le Guin's name wrong all these years?!

I hope War hammer is in here.

This video is like eating your favorite food and wishing for it not to end 😢

Love to hear more with Dune or really any of these. These are great and I love watching this.

Side note… the Sirius Cybernetics group were the first up against the wall when the revolution came.

The ammount of puns in this video is... astronomical!

Is that Peter Davison saying Barnard's Star?

Hi! How did you voice the British guy? Sounds a lot like Mycroft (the voice assistant). Is it?

I'd like to add that Tau Ceti is the first star visited by a human in the BattleTech / MechWarrior setting.
It was the successful target of the first FTL jump in February 2108 by Raymond Bache, and was the beginning of the colonization of the zone approximately 550 Light-years from Earth, eventually known as the Inner Sphere.

Too many advert, thumbs down!

Hold the fuck up.
Arrakis is in the CANOPUS system.
As in...the Magistracy of Canopus? From Battletech?
YOOOO

I absolutely loved that you included the Bobiverse series!!
And YES, I would love to watch more in depth videos on the Bobiverse, Dune, Known Space, Farscape, Firefly & whatever else you'd like to focus in on with more depth!!
I do have a question...Why did you not include the 4th book in the Bobiverse series, Heaven's River in your hypothesis on space travel/location? I'd really love to have seen a representation of the Dyson Sphere used in the book! I know you showed the Ring World version but I imagine Heaven's River looking massively different for some reason.
Nerds rule!!!

This was cool. Next you should do a video speculating which galaxies in the universe are from fiction

Meow from Space Dandy is also from Betelgeuse.

— meanwhile that of (the help from the [Sky]'s) GA Humanity's.

(even though starting this one version's off with back in the certain home System already—at the start of that one vast franchise's from where this referenced version of Mankind that I know comes from—anyways. so.

not too much reasons from this one example that I know then, other than their 128b/etc, to their likely future planned M31 trips, etc colonial reaches outside of Sol, Hrm.

I....guess going as far as to who-knows-where/(when) Volantis 2082 (for one example for GA Humanity) is, by a couple of GA Humanity member scientist/etc teams, is some outside-of-Sol-System kind of feat and measurement for here in this subject's own still limited take counts for them then too perhaps, yes?

do not even get me started with their more....kind of 'powerful' variant of this said-version of Humanity's, back on the Distributary Space that half of them are now on (after the whole thing with the Collapse event. of GA Humanity's own GA era and its end). as even more farther than probably their more earlier thought-up planned expansion trips (the intergalactic ones), like the one with M31 or with Messier 33, back in Real Space Sol, than they could have ever thought of then during that time).

— anyways, or: UCN/ISA/ICSA vs Higs 'empire' era Humankind's.

(some basicality: just some playstation side version of that one certain overrated version of Humankind back in the halo universe's and galaxy's/franchise's (kind of still), though....just with 'lesser' territorial number count compared to the former's (pre-Human-covenant empire war era) '800'+ back in halo universe/franchise Lore).

— or even a Bit of Old One era/Sirius era Humankind's Sirius X/Sirius System colony (mostly prominently. old one era people and once with Sirius era colonists used to have some sort of having Lunar colonial activities back in their own reality's version but maybe it is way too Close to Earth for here in this video's, yes?). from the horizon universe and galaxy/franchise.

— (is IMC/frontier militia era Humankind here too on this video of yours, or....?).

— (some others more, unlike Most Examples in here, though I could not easily share others more (like some of those, somewhat(?), Mankind members from the culture races, or those of pre-Human-qax conflicts era Human beings from the xeelee multiverses(?)/books, etc few others more) in such a place like this at the Moment, though these mentioned What-would-have-been suggestions are enough for now then....).

This is fantastic. I've wanted to see something like this for years and just thought no one would ever bother because it was too much work. I didn't realise how many series I enjoy are actually set in real parts of space. So that was really enjoyable too. This is so well made and well researched. A beautiful representation. Thank you. And the comments about star people at the end was lovely

Bravo! We have populated the stars in our imagination, and I too yearn for the day we populate them in reality. Thank you for this walk through the territory mapped by astronomers, on a grid that helps this sadly 2D mind to see 3D.