Education Just incase you thought the Earth was big

http://atinyglimpse.ytmnd.com/

I think this pulls off a similar effect.. My favorite YTMND site.

 

I was about to post that one

 

That is excellent, and so cool. Seeing that, it seems very arrogant to assume we are the only 'intelligent' life in the universe.

To quote Python, 'Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cos there's bugger all down here on Earth'

 

We always did have an ego complex..

 

Clicky

 

+rep, that made me happy.

So far this is probably my favourite thread on Bit-Tech, I love cosmic proportionality. Relevant reading: Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything. Makes you feel small, though...

 

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is another "makes you feel small" book. Albeit one with a great sense of humor.

 

That's the trouble with these objects, once you get beyond a rational number to really grasp (for me it's not much bigger than a few thousand miles) it's just numbers, and bigger numbers. It's impossible to conceive of the scale of these things, we just don't have the capacity.

Even if we could cope up to VY Canis Majoris, once you get to cluster and galaxy-scales it's just impossible. You start talking about Mpc and Gpc and it's just a blur.

 

I 'shopped a pic of most of these planets together.. and that was just from pluto to Antares & Betelgeuse

Earth was one pixel big, the image was just under 30k x 30k pixels, and that was slightly underestimating the scales, to be on the safe side It was pretty cool how much you have to zoom in and out to see everything

Printing that pic out would be really good to start to appreciate the size of these stars, unless you have a projector!

 

The Miracle Of Life

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realise.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting - fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn't, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements - nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary pharmacy - and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life.


Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air of rocks, no stars or planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe so agreeably material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn't actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. There needn't actually be a universe at all. For a very long time there wasn't. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in. There was nothing - nothing at all anywhere.

So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of all the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most - 99.99 per cent, it has been suggested - are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself - shape, size, colour, species affiliation, everything - and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from 'protoplasmal primordial atomic globule' (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required to you mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

-Bill Bryson​

 

As was pointed out earlier in the thread:



'nuff said.

The size of things as an absolute is almost pointless to discuss. It's not just bigness either: Entire eco-systems can exist in blobs of matter a millionth of our body mass. The universe itself is so huge if you ever totally percieved it all in one go, your head would explode.

Well, unless you were the president of the Universe, naturally.

 

Even then you could not grasp the size.

 

McCandless doing an untethered spacewalk. He was later awarded a medal for having the biggest balls in the universe.

What? He wasn't? Well, he should have been

 

Thank's for that, the laptop im using and my lame ADSL connection took almost a minute to download and render that image, then it shrunk -.-

 

I exist to slow things down

 

No fancy pictures I'm afraid but while doing research for physics I can across this information:

• The visible (to us) universe is 10^15 light years wide
• The above has expanded from an area 3 metres across
• When the visible universe was 3 metres across the size of the entire universe was 10^19 light years wide

Oh and for reference - 10^15 light years is 15 billion light years.

 

Only problem is that they get the sizes of these planets wrong by upto 300% or so.
It's as good as a guess.

 

Wow I feel intimidated by them