Why planetary orbits are so far apart
The eight planets orbit the sun at vastly different distances. Mercury averages 58 million kilometers out, while Neptune orbits at roughly 4.5 billion kilometers. This scale is almost impossible to visualize: if the sun were the size of a marble, even the closest planet would be the length of a football field away, and Neptune would be lost in the horizon. These spacing ratios persist because of orbital mechanics; planets naturally settle into stable orbits where gravitational pulls and orbital velocities balance.
Early solar system formation scattered planets into these wide gaps. Planets migrating inward and outward from their birth places eventually locked into stable configurations that minimize gravitational interference with one another. The result is a system where no single planet dominates the space around the sun, but each controls its own neighborhood.
The empty space problem
A common misconception treats the solar system like a crowded stadium. In reality, the planets are tiny dots in an almost entirely empty cosmos. If you scaled the system so the sun could fit in a sphere the size of a room, Jupiter would be a pea 50 meters away, and the nearest planets would still be separated by hundreds of meters. This sparsity explains why solar system collisions are vanishingly rare and why planetary motion is so predictable. The vacuum between orbits is the default state, not an exception.