| Article Index |
|---|
| Walking With Planets |
| Setting Out |
| Venus, Mercury and Mars |
| Jupiter and Saturn |
| Uranus and Neptune |
| Journey's End |
| All Pages |
Jupiter
Come, then, and let us walk from the Earth to Mars and then cross the vast gulf between Mars and Jupiter. Our walk will take us through the Asteroid Belt, where hundreds of thousands of boulders ranging from tiny stones to house-sized blocks career through space. We will take comfort from the fact that no spacecraft has ever suffered damage as it crossed the Asteroid Belt, and hope that we too will be safe. Luckily we survive, and we arrive at the cloudtops of Jupiter after a walk from the Earth of 13,889 years. If we were arriving now, we would have set off in 11,881 BC. This was the Upper Palaeolithic era, a fascinating period of human history known for its technological advances, artistic creativity and advances in social groups which produced the first symbols and rituals.
We return to the Earth, arriving in the year 15,897.
Saturn
The ringed planet, for me, is the highlight of our tour, and our walk from the Earth takes us 28,387 years. If we were arriving in 2008, we would have left in 26,379 BC. This was an era of human history characterised by nomad hunter-gatherer societies. It was a period in which the Neanderthals decline in number to nothing, and when the first artifacts of weaving and cloth-making date from. The Gravettian people roam between Southern Russia and Spain, and stone tools are being produced in large numbers to hunt big animals like mammoth, bison and horses.
After pausing to take in magnificent views of the ring system and to explore Saturn's 60 moons, we return to the Earth, arriving in the year 30,395.
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