But is it emptiness that makes something desolate? It shouldn’t be; the distance between atomic nuclei is hundreds of thousands of times the space their protons and neutrons occupy. A bustling street cannot be called desolate, and yet every inch of that world is made of atoms. Atoms that never get anywhere near their brethren, never truly touch other mass. Maybe vast, dead space—which is no worse than the vacuum between the atoms in a city street—is not desolate either.
An astronomer and a biologist will never agree on what “big” or “distant” mean. They must shift their own perspective to describe the vastness of Jupiter with the same adjective as they would use for the depth of a child’s eyes. It all depends on focal length.