Coding and AI classes in Woking

The learner starts with JPL's orbital elements: Mars has a semi-major axis of 1.52371034 astronomical units, Earth's orbit about 1.00000261. Sunlight spreads over the surface of an ever larger sphere, so its strength falls with the inverse square of distance. Python gives (1.00000261 / 1.52371034) squared, which is 0.4307. Mars receives about 43 per cent of Earth's sunlight, so "barely half" holds up well. Converting the distance with the IAU value of the astronomical unit gives 141.6 million miles, close to Wells's round 140 million.

The second claim uses the cube law. JPL lists mean radii of 3,389.50 km for Mars and 6,371.0084 km for Earth, a ratio of 0.532. Volume grows with the cube, so Mars holds 0.532 cubed, or 0.1506, of Earth's volume: one part in 6.64. Wells wrote "scarcely one seventh", which would be a little under 0.143, so he was slightly low. The learner reports it honestly: close, but the number is a touch more than one seventh, not less.

Mars's orbit is also noticeably oval, with eccentricity 0.0934. At its nearest, 1.3814 au, it gets 52 per cent of Earth's sunlight; at its farthest, 1.6660 au, only 36 per cent. The learner writes one function, scale(ratio, power), and tests it: power minus two for light, three for volume, two for surface area. The final test feeds in a deliberately wrong power and checks the program flags the "two thirds" answer as inconsistent with the square law.

Knowing which law to apply is a solid reason for Woking teenagers to keep learning to code in 2026. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.