History SciFiWritersHave / NoSenseOfDistance

* ''Series/LostInSpace'' acknowledged the depths of space in the first episode: because of the distance to Alpha Centauri, the Robinsons are put in suspended animation to survive the trip. After that though, they are tootling around the various star systems with no difficulty and no reference to time dilation.

* Averted, and wryly lampshaded, in the ''Literature/AncillaryJustice'' trilogy, where established "gates" allow ships to leap swiftly from one location to another, and some ships can even generate their own gates, but various circumstances still require them to take the slower old-fashioned route. At one point, an urgent summons from a gate to the nearest space station still results in our heroines cooling their heels in the shuttle for an entire day.
-->"We often speak casually of distances within a single solar system--of a station's being near a moon or planet, of a gate's being near a system's most prominent station--when in fact those distances are measured in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of kilometers."

** In the first ''Literature/{{Ringworld}}'' novel, the main characters spend a (Earth) year exploring what turns out to be only a very small fraction of the Ringworld's surface because of its immense size. In addition, even with faster-than-light travel (that has a constant rate of one light-year traveled per three days), the Ringworld is almost two years away from Earth, travel-wise.

* One of Creator/JamesWhite's ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' stories features victims from a space collision -- and spends nearly three pages, A6 paperback, detailing the series of coincidences and bad judgment calls that managed to make it happen.

* Technically an issue of ''area'' rather than distance, but the GrandFinale of ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' was based on the Fire Nation using [[MagicMeteor Sozin's Comet]] to [[SaltTheEarth burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground]], using about five zeppelins. Although we don't know the exact size of the Earth Kingdom, it is the largest continent and country in the show's world and based on China, which has an area of about 10 '''million''' square kilometers.

** ''Film/ANewHope''. The trip from Tatooine to Alderaan only takes a few days at most. It's not clear how long the trip from Alderaan to Yavin 4 takes, but it's probably not more than a week. The Millenium Falcon only does .5 past lightspeed, or 1.5 times the speed of light, so the star systems involved are only be a few light-days or a light-week or two apart. Compare that to the light '''years''' between solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy.

** ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'': in the scene where Obi-Wan is discovering Kamino's location, Dax had said Kamino is 12 parsecs outside the Rishi Maze, which Obi-Wan then points to on a map of the galaxy. Apparently the Maze is at the top-left edge of the galaxy and Kamino is around the center based on where the map zooms in on. From this scene you can actually eyeball the whole ''Star Wars'' "galaxy" as only being 50 to 100 parsecs, or about few hundred light-years, across. For comparison the Milky Way is 170,000 light-years across.

:: Even if Lucas meant Luke finding her with the Force (as they become aware of each other's locations in ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' by it for instance) Luke still wouldn't be able to ''get'' to her instantly.

* ''[[VideoGame/EtrianOdysseyI Etrian Odyssey Untold: The Millennium Girl]]'' has the plot twist that [[spoiler:you are really somewhere in [[EarthAllAlong post-apocalyptic Japan]]]]. One of the characters, Raquna, is from Ontario, and the game includes skits where they get various provisions (including a cream churn) from there. If Ontario [[spoiler: [[CanadaEh is where it commonly is]], and not a FantasyCounterpartCulture or [[LondonEnglandSyndrome different type]] of Ontario]], we are looking at traveling 6000 miles at ''minimum''. And there are no known means of fast transportation between cities.

** ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'': in the scene where Obi-Wan is discovering Kamino's location, Dax says Kamino is 12 parsecs outside the Rishi Maze, which Obi-Wan then points to on a map of the galaxy. Apparently the Maze is at the top-left edge of the galaxy and Kamino is around the center based on where the map zooms in on. From this scene you can actually eyeball the whole ''Star Wars'' "galaxy" as only being 50 to 100 parsecs, or about few hundred light-years, across. For comparison the Milky Way is 170,000 light-years across.

** Lucas himself isn't even clear on just how big a ''[[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfMass planet]]'' is. In a conversation with Alan Dean Foster, who was writing ''Literature/SplinterOfTheMindsEye'' for him, Lucas had this exchange (Foster is noticeably polite throughout the transcript, though one gets the distinct impression he's fighting the urge to grab Lucas by the shoulders and shake him):
-->'''Lucas:''' [Princess Leia] hasn't been heard from since, so Luke wonders what's happened to her.
-->'''Foster:''' Then you don't use her as much because you can't find her.
-->'''Lucas:''' Well, he can find her instantly. I mean you've got them both there on the planet.

* The ''Videogame/{{X}}-Universe'' hits this, hard. Aside from the issues where the [[SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfVelocity biggest ships can be outrun by a Toyota Prius]] (if you floor it, mind), the sector planets are terrifyingly close. While they seem massive up close, you can fly between them if you really want to. Argon Prime, an Earth-like world, has a moon that is closer to the planet than the distance between Florida and California. The series averts this between sectors, however - it's never explicitly stated where ''any'' of the sectors are, meaning that they could be on opposite sides of the galaxy or adjacent to each other. And if you use the [[BlindJump Unfocused jumpdrive]], you'll typically wind up in the dead space between galaxies. ''Videogame/XRebirth'' features more logical distances as it shifts to a new interplanetary travel system, though planets are smaller than they should be.

** ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'': in the scene where Obi-Wan is discovering Kamino's location, Dax says Kamino is 12 parsecs outside the Rishi Maze, which Obi-Wan then points to on a map of the galaxy. Apparently the Maze is at the top-left edge of the galaxy and Kamino is at the center based on where the map zooms in on. From this scene you can actually eyeball the whole ''Star Wars'' "galaxy" as only being 50 to 100 parsecs, or about few hundred light-years, across. For comparison the Milky Way is 170,000 light-years across.

** ''Film/AttackOfTheClones'': in the scene where Obi-Wan is discovering Kamino's location, Dax says Kamino is 12 parsecs outside the Rishi Maze, which Obi-Wan then points to on a map of the galaxy. Apparently the Maze is at the top-left edge of the galaxy and Kamino is at the center. From this scene you can actually eyeball the whole ''Star Wars'' "galaxy" as only being 50 to 100 parsecs, or about few hundred light-years, across. For comparison the Milky Way is 170,000 light-years across.

* In episode 5 of ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace'', the characters zap themselves to Mars and just happen to land right next to a Mars rover. Mars is a pretty big place and this is vanishingly unlikely (though as a comedy it runs by RuleOfFunny anyway).

* ''The Death of Sleep'', in Creator/AnneMcCaffrey's ''Literature/PlanetPirates'' series, has the protagonist's ship gets damaged, and she has to put herself into cryo in a lifeboat to have any chance of being found. The book goes out of its way to point out that if some benevolent aliens hadn't led a guy in a ship to her, she probably would never have been found.

* George R.R. Martin's ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': Although it's set on a continent about the size of South America (to judge by the distances given), going by travel times, it's roughly the size of Great Britain. Even that seems to be a stretch, because the North, which according to GRRM is based on Scotland, is effectively administered at the top by a single Lord and Lady, one Maester, and one knight. Then there's the multi-continental spy network with an extremely flat hierarchy of all field agents reporting to one man (Varys)...
** The Wall, [[ShapedLikeItself a 700-foot tall wall]] (~215 meters) which marks the northern boundary of the Seven Kingdoms, is probably the most obvious example. Martin is said to have been shocked by the first images of it for the TV series, having never pictured it being as huge as it turned out to be. For comparison, the highest point on the Great Wall of China is only about 50 feet (15m) at its tallest, the tallest castle walls in the world are closer to 180 feet (55m), the Statue of Liberty is 305 ft or 93 m and the tip of the Eiffel Tower is 1,063 ft or 324 m. Considering the wall is supposed to also be a continuous structure, hundreds of miles in length, the end result has more in common with geographicall features than anything man-made; even if it was somehow built by people it'd be absurd as a defensive structure, as hitting targets at the bottom with any accuracy would be impossible.

** Unfortunately, there's no justification for the scene in which Londo, representing the Centauri, and Morden, representing the Shadows, appear to be splitting '''the entire Milky Way''' into two spheres of influence on a map. The series is otherwise very consistent that all the sapient races depicted only inhabit a speck of the Orion Arm.

** In ''Literature/TheNewRebellion'', after casually lampshading the idea of TwoDSpace, Wedge takes a turbolaser cannon and shoves aside the targeting computer -- he doesn't have TheForce, but [[BadassNormal he's confident in his own abilities]] and, while normally targets are too far away to get a visual, ''this'' one is close enough to see.

-->'''[=McCoy=]:''' Thousands, thousands.\\
-->'''Scotty:''' ...''thousands'' of miles on an invited tour of inspection...

** The series generally tried to avoid this, but creator J. Michael Straczynski acknowledged the problem of space's true scale when talking about showing space battles on TV, pointing out that TV viewers want and need to ''see'' the ships in the same screenshot pounding away at one another, but that any actual kind of space battle would likely take place at distances far too extreme for this (thousands of kilometers at minimum). The battle between the Shadows and the Narns in "The Long Twilight Struggle" attempted to acknowledge this on the screen; most of the fight consists of the ships simply accelerating towards one another, and only the last (catastrophic) few seconds includes any visual proximity. Indeed, the battle also featured quite a bit of {{Old School Dogfight}}ing, but the fighters were so small compared to the capital ships that you can only discern them as specks and flashes of light around the bigger ships. Nonetheless, most of the series' remaining battles gave in to the RuleOfCool anyway. It's also explained that space battles happen so close due to beam weapon dispersal.

*** In the series pilot, [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS01E01E02Emissary Emissary]], Deep Space Nine is physically moved from a near orbit of Bajor to the mouth of the wormhole in the Denorios belt, a "charged plasma field" some 116 million kilometres from Bajor (expanded universe sources suggest that the Denorios belt is the Bajoran system's equivalent of our own asteroid belt, which is around 330 million kilometres beyond Earth's orbit). With only six working thrusters on the station, even miracle worker O'Brien believes this would take at least a month; but they manage to make this trip in less than a day by using the station's deflector shields to generate a low-level warp field and "lower the inertial mass of the station", which nearly tears the station apart in the process. Even O'Brien's original estimate suggests the station's sub-starship thrusters are ''very'' powerful, since it would need to achieve an average speed of ~47km/sec to do that journey in a month; for comparison, Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 15km/sec.

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959''
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS4E118OnThursdayWeLeaveForHome On Thursday We Leave For Home]]". An Earth colony is stranded on a hellish asteroid orbiting two suns, which means it's in another solar system. The asteroid is described as being either ten billion miles from Earth (in the previous episode's preview) or one billion (repeatedly, in the episode itself). In either case, it's much closer to the Sun than it is to another star (or stars), and in the second case it's closer to the Earth than Saturn.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E14ThirdFromTheSun Third From the Sun]]". Aliens living on an Earth-like planet say they're going to Earth, which is 11 million miles away. A planet that close should be able to be seen with the naked eye.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E20Elegy Elegy]]". The episode's introduction says that the astronauts are "lost amongst the stars" in "a far corner of the universe". They end up on an asteroid in a solar system with two suns, which shows that they're outside Earth's solar system. However, they say (twice!) that they're 655 million miles from Earth, which shows that not only are they not lost, but they're actually inside the Earth's solar system between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn!
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E129Probe7OverAndOut Probe 7: Over and Out]]". The pilot of a starship says that he has crashlanded on a planet 4.3 light years from his home planet. In the narration, Rod Serling says that he's "several million miles" from his launching point, which is a lot less than 4.3 light years (more than 25 trillion miles).
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS3E89ToServeMan To Serve Man]]"

** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E7TheLonely The Lonely]]". The episode takes place on an asteroid whose orbit brings it within 9 million miles of Earth on a regular basis. The asteroid is "6,000 miles from north to south, 4,000 from east to west" (about 5,000 miles wide). In RealLife the largest known asteroid in the solar system is Ceres, which has a diameter of 587 miles. If an asteroid 5,000 miles wide had an orbit that often brought it within 9 million miles of Earth, astronomers would certainly have detected it by now.
** "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS1E15IShotAnArrowIntoTheAir I Shot an Arrow into the Air]]". A rocket sent to visit an asteroid crash lands. The location of the landing, while unpleasantly hot, has Earth-normal gravity and an Earth-normal atmosphere... so normal that, in fact, the astronauts are still on Earth and never made it anywhere. That's realistic, but any astronauts who would believe that they actually made it to an asteroid despite having a very short journey and the landing place not requiring space suits or the like should not have passed the mental examination, even given 1959 levels of space knowledge!

* ''Series/WizardsOfWaverlyPlace'' episode 5. They zap themselves to Mars and just happen to land right next to a Mars rover. Mars is a pretty big place and this is vanishingly unlikely (though as a comedy it runs by RuleOfFunny anyway).

* Creator/AlanDeanFoster's ''Literature/HumanxCommonwealth'' has a thriving merchant trade. There would have to be millions of ships running nonstop routes between every star system to deliver even a fraction of the goods required to sustain an economy the size of the Commonwealth's. On the other hand, The Tar-Aiym Krang posits a concept both unique in space opera and brilliant; '''it is impossible to patrol interstellar space!''' If you don't travel within sensor range of a monitored system, you can go anywhere you want.

* In the ''Literature/HonorHarrington'' books, Creator/DavidWeber averts this: ships in his books routinely battle at ranges of millions of kilometers or more, battles take hours or even days before anyone is in range of anyone else, and until the Manticorans finally invent a workable FTL communication system, everyone deals with long delays between sending a message and getting a reply due to the distances involved.

** "Star system", "galaxy" and "universe" get mixed up a lot. For example Commander Adama says that Earth is located in "a galaxy much like our own" ...and in the last episode, the basestar is apparently the only one in the ''galaxy'' in which the ''Galactica'' is located, and the rest of the Cylon fleet is spread throughout the ''universe'' looking for the ''Galactica'''s fleet! They'd have greater success looking for an electron-sized needle in a haystack the size of Jupiter. ** "Lightspeed" is also frequently mentioned as the Galactica's top speed, with most of the fleet being much slower, and they're talking about crossing galaxies when they likely would barely make it to the next star system.
** Episode "Lost Planet of the Gods Part II". The Galactica discovers a star in the middle of a great dark void. Commander Adama says to search for a planet in an orbit 1-3 parsecs (roughly 3.25-9.75 light years) away from the star. When the Galactica reaches the planet, the star's light illuminates the planet. Even if the planet were only 1 parsec away, it would still be too far away for the star to provide daylight to the planet or the gravity of the star to hold the planet in orbit around it.

* ''VideoGame/{{Starfield}}'' suffers a similar problem with the ''X-Universe'' games in which the [[AsteroidThicket asteroids]] and [[DangerousOrbitalDebris space debris]] are way too close in orbit with their parent moons/planets, which roughly means they run the risk of [[ColonyDrop impact events]] that can affect their moons/planets at an alarmingly high frequency rate. The developers admitted this to coming up with their own versions of writing up space travel and objects for the sake of convenience as almost all of the levels are procedurally generated, but even one with a passing knowledge of astrophysics should take into account that the orbital distances of such objects should be far more distant than what is portrayed in the game.

* ''VideoGame/{{Starfield}}'' suffers a similar problem with the ''X-Universe'' games in which the asteroids and space debris are way too close in orbit with their parent moons/planets, which roughly means they run the risk of [[ColonyDrop impact events]] that can affect their moons/planets at an alarmingly high frequency rate. The developers admitted this to coming up with their own versions of writing up space travel and objects for the sake of convenience as almost all of the levels are procedurally generated, but even one with a passing knowledge of astrophysics should take into account that the orbital distances of such objects should be far more distant than what is portrayed in the game.

** In both ''Wing Commander'' and ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'', some planets are within tens of kilometers apart from one another and sometimes as close as ''20 kilometers from their system's star(s)''. Said planets are sometimes visible from one another as sizes larger than the area the moon fills in the sky. On the other hand, if we use planets as a rough benchmark, stars are damn ''tiny'' in this game, and the ships are ''massive''.