What If Earth Moved to Every Planet's Orbit? Your Street Goes From 2,424°F to -399°F

You stand on your own street, Main Street in Kansas City, on an ordinary summer morning. Then the whole Earth is slid to a new orbit, one planet at a time. At Mercury's orbit the oceans boil into the sky and the road melts. Back past home it rains for nearly two thousand years. Then the seas freeze, the air itself snows and rains down, and the trip keeps going past Neptune and Pluto, through the Oort cloud, all the way to the nearest stars. You watch every stop from your front step, as the Sun shrinks from a blazing disc to one star among thousands. The real numbers: the stops sit at each planet's distance from the Sun. Mercury 0.387 AU, Venus 0.723, Mars 1.52, Ceres in the asteroid belt 2.77, Jupiter 5.2, Saturn 9.57, Uranus 19.2, Neptune 30.2, Pluto 39.5, then 50,000 AU in the Oort cloud and 4.37 light-years at Alpha Centauri. From home the Sun is 0.533° wide and gives 1,361 watts per square metre. At Mercury's orbit it shines 6.7 times stronger and the ocean is gone in 166 years. 6.37 million km past home the steam can finally rain back out, which takes 1,860 years. Carbon dioxide snows out at 2.99 AU, the air rains as liquid at 7.32 AU and freezes 33 feet deep at 12.8 AU. Past 43.8 AU, the heat coming up from inside the Earth (47 terawatts) warms your street more than the Sun does, and it holds the street at -399°F from there on. Seen from Alpha Centauri, the Sun is a magnitude +0.5 star in Cassiopeia. What isn't real: this is a 3D simulation built in Blender. Every number on screen is computed by a physics script from sourced values, and the cheats are named here. Each move between orbits takes a few seconds, and how a planet could be moved isn't physics. The Earth is parked just outside each planet's pull so you can see it big in the sky. A real Earth there would be dragged off station, but the picture holds it in place. The asteroids drift far closer together than the real belt, where they're about a million km apart. Stars streak past so the motion shows, and each stop fast-forwards 10,000 years so the temperature you see is the settled average. The steam-world temperatures are interpolated from published runaway-greenhouse models. The boiling and raining times are rough lower limits that clouds would change. The ice is assumed to reflect 60% of sunlight all the way out, and hydrogen escape, volcanoes and the slow freezing of the deep ocean are left out. Everything that made your street home was one number: how far it sat from one star. 0:00 Your street 0:44 Mercury's orbit 1:28 Venus's orbit 2:03 Home again 2:40 Mars's orbit 3:23 The asteroid belt 3:58 Jupiter's orbit 4:40 Saturn's orbit 5:18 Uranus's orbit 5:54 Neptune's orbit 6:24 Pluto and beyond 7:03 The Oort cloud 7:47 Alpha Centauri 8:18 One dot among the stars #whatif #science #space #simulation