SCALE FACTOR
Bike rides give a sense of perspective – some are out of this world, says Rob Ainsley
When you need to ponder life’s big questions, and put things into perspective, there’s nothing better than a bike ride. And there’s nowhere better to do it than to Tesco in York.
That’s because it’s near to a 500-million-to-1 scale model of the solar system that runs seven miles down a railtrail, part of NCN65. The sun is near the supermarket, a grubby steel globe as big as a boulder. Who said nuclear fusion was clean energy? Within a few yards are the cherry-tomato-sized inner planets, including a gaudy sea-blue Earth complete with moon, and a rust-red Mars. A few hundred yards away, Jupiter is a swirly football in Bishopthorpe housing estate. And so on.
It’s great for families. I’ve entertained several of our lot with a cod-PatrickMoore spiel about the planets themselves en route, about how Venus rains sulphuric acid, Jupiter is made of gas, Uranus was nearly called George, and Pluto Percy.
It’s a powerful demonstration of how vast space is. The silver pea of Pluto feels a long, long way away. At this scale, the speed of light is about 1.5mph, but to cycle to the nearest star – Proxima Centauri – you’d have to warp-factor past Selby, past Dover, past Cape Town, and nearly twice around the earth.
In our galaxy there are 100 billion stars. And there are 100 billion galaxies. And as we now know, stars routinely have planets. The chances of life on any one are astronomically small, but the number of planets is astronomically big. So, is anybody out there? Big stuff: not bad for a family bike ride.
You can insert your own joke about the search for intelligent life in other unlikely situations, such as comments sections of bike-related items in local news websites.
Anyway, meanwhile in Cambridge, there’s another 500-million-to-1 scale model, but the other way around: a mile
Using a bike to understand life, the universe and everything is popular
represents a 10,000th of an inch. By Addenbrooke’s Hospital, running alongside the railway to Shelford, is a ‘DNA cycle path’. In a nod to the town’s biotech genius, the tarmac is decorated with a mile-long multi-coloured bar code. The 10,257 stripes in four colours represent the four bases of gene BRCA2, which among other things plays a significant role in breast cancer. It’s one of the 20-odd thousand genes that make up the human genome – ‘your DNA’.
Using a bike to understand life, the universe and everything is popular. York recently gained a second solar system model – in the university campus, with shorter distances but bigger, brighterpainted planets. The TauntonBridge water canal’ s had one for years. Wikipedia lists dozens, many bikeable, around the world ( goo.gl/AduVdF).
Let’s extend the idea. For instance, the Way of the Roses – one of Britain’s most popular leisure rides, running coast to coast 170 miles from Morecambe to Bridlington – could have timeline plaques illustrating the evolution of life on earth, another mind-bending exercise in scale.
The earth itself would first take shape at the start, by the statue of Eric Morecambe. (Possible caption: Earth created. What do you think of it so far? Rubbish.) Primitive bacteria would appear after 30 miles or so, around the village of Austwick. Fish would arrive in Driffield, 150 miles in, and dinosaurs would roam between miles 162 and 167.5, as you approach Bridlington. Homo sapiens would appear just 13 yards before the finish sign on the promenade; Stonehenge would be constructed 11in in front of it; the bicycle would turn up in the last third of an inch; your lifetime would be little more than the depth of the sign itself. That puts perspective on the significance of things – say, being shouted at by a taxi on the way in. I’ve often celebrated this fleeting privilege called life in unpretentious fashion, with fish ’n’ chips, a paddle, ice cream and a drink and a laugh. Whether or not there are scale models to look at, a bike ride always gives a healthy sense of proportion.
That’s something the last ice cream I had in Bridlington, to round off a day ride from York, didn’t have. Pluto has smaller moons. Which reminds me, according to yet another scale, the bathroom’s, it’s time to get out riding.