Monday, November 4, 2013

What man-made artifacts can be seen from the moon?


Deduct ten points if you said the Great Wall of China.
No human artifacts at all can be seen from the moon with the naked eye.
The idea that the Great Wall is the only man-made object that can be seen from the moon is
all-pervasive, but it confuses the moon with space.
Space is quite close. It starts about 60 miles from the earth’s surface. From there, many artificial objects
are visible: motorways, ships on the sea, railways, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual
buildings.
However, at an altitude of only a few thousand miles after leaving the earth’s orbit, no man-made
objects are visible at all. From the moon—more then 250,000 miles away—even the continents are
barely visible.
And, despite Trivial Pursuit telling you otherwise, there is no point in between the two where only the
Great Wall of China is visible.

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