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"Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighborly intervals—the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations—but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same piece of paper. Neptune in reality isn’t just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it’s way beyond Jupiter—five times farther from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 percent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway)."

Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts but the solar system doesn’t end there. In fact, it isn’t even close to ending there. We won’t get to the solar system’s edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets… Far from marking the outer edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one 50,000th of the way.
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

In high school for an in class project we took some receipt tape and laid out the distances between the planets. Every cm was 10 million miles. The 4 inner planets were all within a narrow band and the outer planets were much much father apart. It really showed the scale of the solar system.

Distances within the Solar System are huge, beyond the imagination. But even those are tiny compared to outside of it.

You certainly can't get an idea of the size of the cosmos from pop sci fi. Star Trek treats travelling to others stars like flying from once city to another. The series claimed the Federation had explored 11% of the galaxy, but that's at least 10 billion stars. If it's 300 years in the future, they must have explored 1 or 2 stars every second starting from now. And that says nothing of the sheer distances either. If our star is comparable to a grape 1 cm across, the nearest other star is another grape 180 miles away. That's just the nearest one, and there are at least 100 billion more just in this galaxy, one of at least a trillion.