The size of our world

[Taryn]

http://sizeofworldse.ytmnd.com/

[Bella Fortuna]

That's really cool, Taryn, thanks!

[FBM]

Wow... That really puts things into perspective...

+1 for Taryn! ^^^

[RPizzle]

I liked that. Children should see this.

[Thinking Aloud]

There's a really nice video rendering of these relationships on YouTube - never fails to impress me...

[Jadestone]

Very cool. The music was a nice touch.

Once when my family visited the Museum of Science and Industry, I saw a video that started out looking at a family having a picnic, then slowly zoomed out to show the park, then the town, the area, the country, the earth, then the solar system, increasing in speed so you didn't lose track of the scale it had started at, and kept going through the galaxies. Then at the end it zoomed back in to the picnicking family, then down into the man's hand and did the zoom thing down to the atomic level. At age 12, it was completely mind-blowing. I wasn't able to find it on youtube, but if anyone does it is worth staring at for several cycles until your family drags you away.



EDIT: I FOUND IT I FOUND IT I FOUND IT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

It starts in my city, and I can pick out vagely where I live, and it's just... O.O *mindfucked*



We are so finite

[BrettA]

All three of these were a real treats - thanks for posting!!! And just for interest, Jadestone, this is the 3rd version of Powers of 10 (at least that I've seen). The first was in the early- to mid-70's I believe and was B&W, the second a few years late, and now this - the only one I think with voice-over (and Morrison, no less!). The first two were with music, but each version is better than the last, IMO.


Good thing that God's managing all that, huh? An unimaginably high number of quarks and muons all the way up to 25-40 septillion stars and the galaxies and structures 'beyond', including dog farts, photosynthesis, predation, emotions, insects and all. What a guy!

[Rum]

Amazing stuff. I also recall seeing somethign similar going in the other direction - to the subatomic ultimately. Anyone come across it?

[Feck]

Amazing that god made it so complicated and BIG out there just to put some lights in the night sky .

[Rum]

[Faithfree]

Excellent clips everyone!





"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams

[BrettA]

Amazing stuff. I also recall seeing somethign similar going in the other direction - to the subatomic ultimately. Anyone come across it?

I looks to me like you didn't view the whole thing, as the last ~half does indeed go in the other direction - to the subatomic, unless I'm not grasping your meaning (as did the other two '70-ish 'Power of 10' flicks that I alluded to, as well.).

[Faithfree]

A very humbling insight into the vastness of space and time.

[Horwood Beer-Master]

"I'm nothing in this universe. Nothing but pieces of dust"

[GeneticJen]

A very humbling insight into the vastness of space and time.

So that the other day, brilliant video!

When it comes to putting things into perspective, I always thought Sagan did it best.

Post lifted from RD.Net ("Astronomy Pic Of The Day" thread):

Another for 2008 November 3 - The greatest and most important space photograph ever taken?



Explanation: This image changed my life, and I don't think any other image ever did. You should see several "lines" on this image. These are not the subjects of this image. On the line furthest to the right, you will see an absolutely tiny dot a little more than half-way down the image. This photograph was taken by Voyager 1 and it was the late Carl Sagan's idea to do so. This image has become one of the most famous and awe-inspiring images ever taken and has been named by Sagan himself as "The Pale Blue Dot". Essentially, it's an image of a dot in space. That's all. It would be an absolute crime to use my own words here, so the following text is taken from Sagan himself. Here, he describes this photograph in his own words.

The spacecraft was a long way from home. I thought it might be a good idea, just after Saturn, to take once last glance homeward. From Saturn, the Earth would appear too small for Voyager to make out any detail. Our planet would be just a point of light, a lonely pixel, hardly distinguishable from any of the other points of light Voyager would see... nearby planets, far off suns. But, precisely because of the obscurity of our world, thus we veiled, such a picture may be worth having. It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity, that the Earth was a mere point, in a vast, encompassing, cosmos. But, no-one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance, and perhaps also our last, for decades to come.

So, here they are. A mosaic of squares laid down on top of the planets and a background smattering of more distant stars. Because of the reflection of sunlight of the spacecraft, the Earth seems to be sitting in a beam of light, as if there were some special significance to this small world. But its just an accident of geometry, and optics. There are no signs of humans in this picture. Not our re-working of the Earth's surface, not our machines, not ourselves. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. We are too small. In the scale of worlds, humans are inconsequential... a thin film of life, on an obscure and solitary lump of rock, and metal.

Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings. How eager they are to kill one another. How fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot: the only home we've ever known.

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrochemist and author.

"To live on in the hearts we leave behind, is to never die."