16. The tiny circle inside the smallest square now contains the whole field in which the vicissitudes of the solar system take place. If we continue the reckoning we used in drawings 4, 5, and 9, we should be now at a height of 5 million million kilometers above the horizon of that village in Holland from where we started. As we have imagined all along that we are making our trip without spending time, this means that it would have taken the light rays which we now see more than six months to cover the enormous distance from the earth, even though they travel at the rate of 299,800 kilometers per second! It also means that if we had a marvellously good telescope and could see details of events on earth, the events we watched would be those that happened more than six months ago!
1 cm. in picture = 1016 cm. = 100,000,000,000 km.
Scale = 1:1016