I know where outer space is, but where is inner space?

PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 62 points –

I know I'm not the first one to wonder, but really...

31

Inside of the Earth's gravity well I guess, You could probably even say it's just low earth orbit if you consider the moon outer space.

Is inside the atmosphere really space though? Sure, in the sense it has a volume, but that's not what people mean by space

The Earth's gravity well extends far beyond the atmosphere. The moon is for example is well inside the gravity well and even the hill sphere meaning Earth's gravity is the dominant gravity force on the moon.

Earth's gravity extends to infinity, even though extremely small. There is always gravitational attraction between two objects.

Atmosphere might be better measure

Technically speaking, the gravity well is finite in diameter and is defined as where gravity reaches the โ€œmehโ€ level.

Right, but gravity well isn't the boundary where outer space begins. The moon is clearly in outer space, so I'm not really sure why you'd suggest that "within the gravity well" would be inner space. In fact, Earth's gravity well never ends, it simply diminishes with the square of distance. The entire universe is within Earth's gravity well, so where would you even put the boundary? Where Earth is no longer the largest gravitational force?

Anyways, it doesn't matter because as you clearly demonstrated, it can't be related to gravity.

Its one of my favourite windows 3.11 games

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/operation-inner-space-e1b

I put more hours into this game than is even reasonable.

I cant imagine this game running on a steam library! Lol what were hardrive sizes at the time? Had we even got to gigabytes yet?

around Windows 3.11 you'd be lucky to have 80 or 120 megabytes.. and you'd think boy thats a lot of floppies!

Man I remember how awesome it felt to get a huge thing of floppies. I bought this set that had 20 of each color. Something about it just felt badass, having a shit ton of floppy disks.

It was kind of fun to mix cyberspace contents with physical locations. We donโ€™t do that any more.

From one of my favorite episodes of X-Files, where I first heard the term "inner space," I define it as subterranean/oceanic. The space within our planet. The episode was talking about aliens that came from the center of the Earth, as opposed to space. And I always thought that was a neat twist. It was also one of those weird ass ones Duchovney directed so it was high on the humor scale and featured the Lone Gunmen which I always liked.