Thank you Dan. I'm grateful for your quick and well presented answer to my query.

@EricDuminil This answer does not assert its example is to scale.

@jpmc26 indeed, but since the analogy is used as an argument to ignore the leash as a rounding error, it shouldn't be off by 5 orders of magnitude. With this margin, it could also be "proven" that the OP is within dog's reach.

@EricDuminil He didn't say the dog was on leash. He just said that it is running in circles around him. Perhaps those circles have a radius of 10 km. :-) Regardless of the details, his basic point is still valid. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 0.17% of the distance from the Earth to Mars. (385e3 km vs 225e6 km on average)

@Jay: Thanks for the comment about the leash, I didn't remember it while writing the comment on a smartphone. The analogy is still wrong by more than 2 orders of magnitude, though.

Let me rephrase. While it's a great analogy, the distances are off by too many orders of magnitude. Dan should edit it. In short, What @EricDuminil said is, simply, utterly correct. It shouldn't be off by 5 orders of magnitude. It's that simple. The answer should be edited.

@Fattie Why should it be edited? Why does it matter that the orders of magnitude are different in this analogy than in the actual situation?

Because 5 orders of magnitude is a lot

5 orders of magnitude would indeed be problematic, if the Dan had made any kind of suggestion that analogy had any scale relationship. The answer itself is completely correct.

@Fattie: I had a small mistake in my comment too : I considered that the dog is only 1m, while it could probably be 50m or even 100m. The analogy is still wrong by a few orders of magnitude, though.

@Fattie There are no distances listed in the answer, so how could they be off? Ok, let's say we separately research the distance from Chicago to London, since there's no distance listed for the dog, again we can't know that the ratio of distances is off, since we can't calculate the ratio.

@ToddWilcox, unless the dog is an amphibian, there are some limits we can establish on the distance.

Regarding Jay and Todd's (witty) rejoinder that "we don't know the distance of a dog running around in circles!!" While funny (reminds me of Steve Martin), of course this is just, well funny. (You can also simply assert you don't know how big/small the two humans involved are - they could be 100,000 miles wide beings. Or "you" and "me" may not be referring to humans. Chicago and London could easily have moved; and there are 100s of locations with those names other than the major cities.) It's totally uninteresting to point out that obvious assumptions in English, "may not be that!"

@Fattie don't forget the huge issue that the dog is not moon-shaped. Its ratio of major to minor axis compared to the moon's is off at least a couple of orders of magnitude.

? A dog's ratio of major to minor axis is exactly the same order of magnitude.

Order of magnitude means "power of 10". For example, a pencil's major to minor axis ratio indeed differs by about 1 order of magnitude. To a first order approximation (ask any programmer at Pixar) a dog is a ball. But that would be a huge mistake for a pencil.

If you thought a pencil was a ball, you'd be off by an order of magnitude. If you think a dog is a ball you're correct.

Socially, you are closer to me than your dog, as your dog doesn't communicate to me. Um...well...after reading some other questions here, maybe your dog is communicating on stackoverflow...