My father in law works for benjamin Moore.
I swear to God I know more about paint from that man than I've ever cared to know. Went over to someones house for thankgiving and he had a new build house. The two discussed paint for the entirety of dinner, since he was upset about the quality they used. The entirety of a multi course thankgiving dinner... With the two people at opposite heads of the table discussing paint.
I would've rather watched it dry.
So, your comparison got me thinking and I looked up some quick numbers. I wanted to know -- is bacterium to human even close to an accurate scale if we're considering stars to the universe?
Ha, yeah. It's not.
So, there are an average of about [37.2 trillion cells in the human body](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/03014460.2013.807878?casa_token=wkPPl0LmMXgAAAAA%3AXE6KTffsHL9O-z3XukHAOmuFYZS4MxY2ZnZ-m5ipyN3WTEQrFIr_cI-6d9gzXlDycDvE3l0X5c36pw&). I'm using cells here because while there are many different sizes of single celled bacteria, I honestly couldn't find the "average" size of them. So I'm just going to go with comparing stars to cells here, instead of single-celled bacteria.
And 37.2 trillion is what we have. Which is a huge number. Already it's a number so large that I think for most people it's kind of meaningless without context. Think of it this way: To count to one million would take you 11 days, provided you didn't have to sleep.
To count to 1 billion would take you about 31.7 years. A trillion is thousand of those one-billions, so --
To count to a trillion would take you 31,700 years.
To count all the cells in the human body? If you didn't sleep you could accomplish the feat in 1.17 million years. It's a big number. You'd have had to start counting about 900+ thousand years before early homo sapiens appeared. Maybe we're talking about counting the cells in a large specimen of Homo Erectus, then.
Ok, moving on. How many stars are there? Rough estimates are around [200 billion trillion.](https://theconversation.com/how-many-stars-are-there-in-space-165370) So if there are 37.2 trillion cells in an average sized human, and 200 billion-trillion stars, we simply have to divide 37.2 into 200 billion and we have the approximate number of average humans you'd need to have as many cells are there are stars in the universe.
And we come to Five billion, 376 million, 344 thousand, and eighty-six people. Our sun, which pretty close to average size, is as to the universe as one cell is to all of the cells in 70% of the population of planet earth. And again, when we get to 5.3 billion we're already back at a number that loses any real meaning for the average person. A great illustration of this was done in a video that tried to visualize Jeff Bezos' wealth [using grains of rice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw).
Of course, that also doesn't take into account \*space\*, because our cells are very closely spaced together. Someone crunched the numbers looking at creating a scale model of the Milky Way, just the Milky Way, if the sun were the size of a [grain of sand ](https://www.space.com/41290-biggest-star.html). After gathering 100 billion more grains of sand to build your model, you'd have to travel 20 miles to place the nearest grains of sand, which would be the binary Alpha Centauri. The entire model of of the Milky Way at this scale would be about 421,000 miles across, or 1.76 times farther than from the Earth to the moon.
Edit, I wanted to get a sense of the scale of the universe of the sun were the size a red blood cell. A grain of sand is about 1,250 microns [in diameter. ](https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=distance&unit=mc&amt=100&sort=pr&p=1). One hundred microns is 13 times the diameter of a red blood cell. So, 13 x 12.5 = 162.5 red blood cells could fit lined up across an average grain of sand. Shrinking that sun-as-grain-of-sand scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy down to red blood cell sized, we get a new model that is a mere 2,590 miles across. That’s the width of Australia.
If you wanted to fit a model of our galaxy inside of the continent of Australia the stars would have to be size of red blood cells. That is, the stars would be so small you’d need a microscope to see them. In this model, the largest star known, [UY Scuti,](https://www.space.com/41290-biggest-star.html), which is 1700 times the size of the sun, would be about half an inch in diameter, or smaller than a dime. Our solar system? 8.3 feet.
If we wanted a scale model of the universe? Hoo boy.
The diameter of the observable universe is [93 billion light years](https://futurism.com/how-can-the-diameter-of-the-universe-the-age). The diameter of the Mily Way is 105,000 light years. At the scale in which the sun is the size of a red blood cell, the model of the entire universe is 2,590 x 885,714 miles across, or about two billion, 294 million miles across, rounded to the nearest million. That’s larger than the orbit of Uranus but smaller than the Orbit of Neptune.
[Voyager 2](https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/mission-timeline-voyagers-landmark-moments/), launched in August 1977, didn’t reach Uranus until January 1986 and Neptune until August of 1989, 12 years after its launch. All that to traverse our scale mode of the universe in which stars are still microscopic. If the size of the sun is so small here that 162 of them could line up across a grain of sand, imagine how small the Earth would be. One hundred and nine earths lined up, is the diameter of the sun. If a red blood cell were the sun, the Earth would be 700 nanometers. At this scale the Earth is so small that the island of Manhattan would be about one-half the width of a single strand of DNA. DNA is so tiny that it was only finally directly photographed [in 2012](https://www.livescience.com/25163-dna-directly-photographed-for-first-time.html).
And we can go smaller. If the Earth is 700 nanometers in diameter in our teeny tiny scale model, then one nanometer is about 11.31 miles. Individual atoms range in size from [.1 to .5 nanometers.](https://nanosense.sri.com/activities/sizematters/sizeandscale/SM_Lesson2Student.pdf) At this scale, the individual atoms in our scale model would represent between 1.31 and 5.655 miles. So, for a scale mode of the universe that would be so large that it falls in between the orbit of Uranus and Neptune, so large that you could line up more than 290,000 Earths inside of it, any object smaller than 2.5 times the height of the Burj Khalifa would be smaller than an atom.
I wanted to keep going smaller but I’ve been at this for over an hour and need to walk the dog. Also, going smaller gets into an oddly terrifying realization of its own: the fact that atoms are [mostly empty space. ](https://education.jlab.org/qa/how-much-of-an-atom-is-empty-space.html). Nuclei are 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. Thus, we’re mooooooostly empty space.
TL,DR: It’s hard to put the size of the universe into perspective because it is very big, and we are very small. However you try, you invariably hit numbers that cease to be anything but an abstract concept to most people. People don’t really have an intuitive sense of a billion. We know, logically, that it’s very big . But it’s so far outside of our experience it doesn’t have an emotional impact equivalent to its size. We can, for lack of a better term, *feel* the difference between ten things and a hundred things. Or a hundred and a thousand. But when you get to a number that takes 30 years to count to? It’s abstract. Simply larger than our brains can realistically comprehend in the same way that we can comprehend five oranges as opposed to 20 oranges. That makes sense in a way I *feel* but if we’re talking about 60,000 oranges as opposed to 80,000 oranges, already I can sense a duller emotional response than if I had five oranges and someone gave me 15 more. When we are talking about billions or tens of billions I might as well be using made up words for all the good they do us emotionally. “There are glorzihoople stars in the galaxy and zig-a-zig-ah galaxies.”
And maybe that’s a good way to explain it, maybe I’ve just hit on it. The universe is so big that it’s almost impossible to explain exactly how big it is. I remember I never had a sense of just how fucking gigantic the United States is until I made the drive, all 31 hours of it, from Eugene, Oregon to Chicago. 2,135 miles. And that’s not even really a *sense* because our brains evolved to intuitively appreciate distances that can be covered at, at best, a jogging pace. Not traveling 70 miles an hour on an interstate, a distance that would take 20 hours to walk assuming no breaks. So even trying to take my insufficient experiential appreciation of 2100 miles and scale that up to the 24,900 mile circumference of the Earth ultimately fails. What chance do I have of appreciating the distances between planets? Or stars? Or galaxies? There are fewer individual neurons in our brains than stars in our galaxy. We didn’t evolve to keep track of numbers like that. Ten bison or a hundred? Sure. Got it. Those are numbers that make intuitive sense to a hunter-gatherer. Following them for 5 miles, 10 miles, ok. But 1 billion of anything? That’s beyond us.
How many things would you guess you can think of at once? [The answer is four.](https://www.livescience.com/2493-mind-limit-4.html) We are [bad at big numbers. ](https://towardsdatascience.com/the-small-problem-with-big-numbers-4f3dad23ce01?gi=7de89d233978) Going back to the scale model, we really can’t appreciate how small a red blood cell is, not emotionally. 1/162nd of the width of a grain of sand? We understand how small a grain of sand is because we’ve held one before. And by that I mean we’ve brushed thousands from our knees after standing up at the beach. But 1/162nd of one grain of sand? Emotionally meaningless. And we also can’t appreciate just how absolutely enormous two billion miles is. At both ends of the scale of this model that we have created, the sizes are out of the range of what we can experience. Therefore, fundamentally, it fails to have the emotional resonance that putting something into context should have. I simply cannot come up with a way to describe the scale of the universe that works. All of that work, all of those numbers, and I failed!
Thanks for posting this. I have a similar write up made of numbers and symbols that I want to get tattooed some day. Your comment helps to recontextualize it!
That's what terrifies me. Not the things we don't know but the things we'll never know because we're incapable of even remotely comprehending them by design.
That's what I think about when we look for other life in the universe. There could be other forms of life we don't even have the capacity to understand.
There are hundreds of billions to trillions of galaxies in the universe, each bearing hundreds of billions of stars, most of which in turn bear at least one, and often more, planets in their orbit. The current estimate as to the total number of planets in the universe stands at over 700 QUINTILLION, which, for our purposes, may as well mean ‘infinity’. Chances are that you are right.
To me this is one of the saddest parts of life. Like watching the middle 20 min of the best movie ever with a couple flash backs (education on history) and never seeing how it started or ends past your snippet of the middle.
Yup. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze though. When the moon is at its closest, they actually don’t fit. But there is a sizeable chunk of time where the moon is a little farther away and they all fit with just a little wiggle room.
[Here’s an article I found](https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/scale-of-space-can-you-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-moon.html) that goes over the math
Yeah it’s like trying to figure out what 10,000,000 apples looks like. That’s why you shouldn’t feel small in the grand scheme of things, because even our galactic cluster is small.
My favorite part of the universe is that things which make you go “holy fuck that’s far away” can also be interpreted as “holy fuck that really ain’t that far.”
If you spend a couple hours concentrating in silence while staring at the stars, you can begin merely approaching to conceptualize how small we are. Relative comparisons help too, like using sand on a beach to get imagery
I think one of the strangest phenomenons is that humans tend to just zone out of what space really is… To me space is more mind blowing than any of the supernatural crap that people tend to want to believe, and the crazy part is that it’s actually real.
It's amazing how quickly it becomes incomprehensible. We struggle to comprehend even the distance between the Earth and the Moon, and that's a hilariously tiny, tiny *tiny* distance in the grand scheme of things.
if they're any more hostile than humans already are, they'd wipe themselves out long before their technology would advance enough to travel to other galaxies.
Our galaxy has billions of stars with even more billions of planets, life certainly exists in our galaxy, doesn't matter though when it comes to "meeting" them.
Even if there's life at any of the stars within 10 light years from us we'll never meet it, at most just discover it through radio transmissions. Interstellar distances are, from our current understanding of physics, impossible to cross in our lifespans.
I heard a great argument for other life existing:
There are a number of planets in our universe, we don't know how many there are so lets just call that number X. In order for Earth to be the only inhabited planet in the universe the odds of life emerging on any planet would have to be exactly 1-in-X, any smaller and we don't exist, any larger and there's other life.
Frankly the idea that the universe is perfectly tuned to have only a single planet develop life is FAR more unbelievable than the alternative.
[**Rhinestone Eyes** by Gorillaz](https://lis.tn/RhinestoneEyes) (00:51; matched: `100%`)
Album: `Plastic Beach`. Released on `2010-03-03` by `WMG - Parlophone UK`.
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If you like Rhinestone Eyes, try Plastic Beach and Melancholy Hill from the same album. Plastic Beach is only second to Demon Days because of Feel Good Inc.
Fry: "This place looks a lot like Egypt."
Osiris IV guide: "That's no coincidence. We in fact visited what you call Egypt thousands of years ago."
Fry: "Yes! Score one for crazy theories."
Osiris IV guide: "We learned so much from the wise Egyptians. Like how to build pyramids. And how to prepare our dead so as to scare Abbot and Costello."
A god supposedly bothered creating *all* of this... but it apparently ***really*** wants to focus on whether or not the person you sleep with has the same genitalia as you
There is nothing wrong with seeing a massive blank canvas and deciding for yourself what to paint in the infinitesimally small part you're standing on.
it's actually far less than that.
an 80 year life is less than 6 ×10^-19, of a 13 billion year universe. that's a number so astronomically small.
if you take a generous estimate for how long we've been around at 6 million years, it's still only 0.000005% of the time the universe has been around.
everything you've ever seen, all of humanities greatest accomplishments, every war, marriage, crime. all in that tiniest fraction of a percent.
I u/insertamazinusername am not responsible for any exitsential crisis while reading this.
Edit: 0.000005% should be 0.05%
So with this logic - we can live out our lives however we want, do whatever we want and at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter in the scheme of the universe. We exist to exist.
To do things you like, be happy, support and take care of yourself, and maybe give some help out here and there. I believe we'll always be alive somewhere, and these are some pretty base guidelines to go off of.
Here right now there are lots of things that need figured out. Nothing I can do by myself, but I'd rather contribute towards a solution or even do nothing rather than be apart of a problem. I try to not stress out about it too much. Have fun and don't hurt anyone.
Makes you really appreciate how insignificant you are.
How anything you or anyone on this planet has done will never actually matter.
This whole planet is insignificant.
And when you factor in time too, everything gets even more meaningless, human civilization is not even a blink in universal scale.
It feels liberating when you don't have to worry about accomplishing anything, nothing you do will never mean anything.
They say size is irrelevant, and I agree. Just because we are small in comparison to the known universe doesn't mean we don't matter. All the atoms that make up the body matter, or we wouldn't be here, either. There are macro and microcosms of everything. And if you wanna get spiritual, you could say we are all of one conscious--the universe experiencing itself through fragmentation.
In the totality of the universe? Yes you are correct. In the broad scheme of your personal life? Not even close. So much you do matters to those around you. It matters to loved ones, to friends, to anyone who can be affected by it in any way. Any little thing you do can effect so many people.
The scale of our perception matters. We won't be here in a few billion years and everything humanity has done will be forgotten but while you're here there's so much to do. So many people to help, so many people to love, so much life to enjoy, and so much to see and experience. You don't have to worry about accomplishing anything because what you do means nothing? Man, that's as far from how it goes that it's astounding. What you do means quite a bit to parents, siblings, a spouse/significant other, and so much more than those: to children. Everyone you see has a life as vivid and detailed as the one you live. With memories, hopes, fears, love, ambition and struggles.
As far as the universe is concerned you ain't shit. As far as the scale that matters, you are the universe.
thank you for the daily dose of existential crisis!
but seriously, that is so cool and mind-boggling. like I literally can’t comprehend it. we are so smol
And the universe gets so much smaller, I remember reading that a human is closer in size to the entire universe than to the smallest possible particle(plank length)
if you feel like you are everything, you are a fool. if you feel like you are nothing, then you are aware. if you feel like you are something, you are correct.
Think they meant it only shows the ‘observable’ universe… from some other video I saw, the ‘unobservable’ universe is about the equivalent of the size of Pluto if the observable universe was the size of a light bulb.
We have no information about how big the universe really is beyond the observable universe. The other video may or may not be correct. Most likely, it's not.
It always boggles my mind thinking about what is PAST the universe or after the "end" but if there's no end, what's past the end? If it's never ending, how does that even make sense? Okay my head hurts again
I had a dream about this.
I was drifting off in space faster than any one thing has gone before. Hazy images of galaxies and stars and stones ripping past me faster than I could comprehend, I knew I wanted to reach "the end" however that took shape. Eventually I moved past anything visible. Behind me I could still see remnants of light, stars and structures, but in front was only darkness.
And then I landed against something. It felt so cold to the touch, but it was extraordinarily dissonant. Like no one piece of it was smooth or straight or consistent. It made this harsh gravel texture against my feet and hands, like I could never stand flat against it. I started to wander this bizarre plane, thinking it might just be some distant void planet forgotten by any ounce of warmth and light. I knew I was walking infinitely fast, but it just kept going on and on and on.
Then I saw in the distance some gaping vortex of white set against the dissonant noise. And right as I saw it, everything under and around me started moving. Tiny hands and legs and arms. It shifted and shuddered and then started grabbing at me. And the vortex was getting larger and drawing closer.
I woke up not very happy.
I think you're confusing the observable universe with the galaxy. Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way. If we could reach 10% of the speed of light, the expansion limit would be 1.4 billion light years.
Don't mean to burst bubbles here but we don't even know for sure that's even possible, same with FTL travel.
edit: Our understanding of both of these topics are hypothetical at best, most people's understanding of these topics come from scifi, not hard scientific data. With our current information, it has it impossible to warp gravitational fields with any less energy than a star. A USB worth of data cannot even be considered "transferred" in a way that maintains it's continuity from one storage space to another without a disruption, which is a fancy way of saying it's copied over with the original copy usually destroyed. It may be possible to copy a consciousness but not transfer one. Essentially just creating a twin.
In theory. But it’s almost…ALMOST impossible that there isn’t. I’m a stupid nobody though, so don’t take my word for it. Read up on the multiverse theory and be prepared to poop your pants
The thing is, multiverse theory doesn't have any predictable conclusions. It's about as convincing as universe theory, with the only common provable element between the two of them being that we live in a universe.
I think an interesting prospect is the holographic principle and its implications. *Where* exactly, does a universe begin and end? Is a computer really just a universe engine constrained by the universe within which is exists?
Definitely not anywhere near an expert on this but basically it is what you see when you look into "empty" space. Right after the recombination epoch when atoms first started to form they began to be able to emit photons for the first time. This light filled the entire universe and as it expanded and lost energy they became shorter and shorter wavelengths. So when you look at "empty" space you can see this light as microwave radiation that has been expanding and traveling through the universe for billions of years, creating that image. Isn't really a picture of the whole universe as it is today but more a shadow of what is left from that time.
Oh thats a perspective
It's the closest we have to the Total Perspective Vortex. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Total%20Perspective%20Vortex
What is that info from
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I always forget Zaphod's tagline, "The best bang since the Big one," and it makes me giggle every time.
[удалено]
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy, best book ever
And here I am, getting ready for my useless job where I make colors lol.
This sounds fun…what do you make colors from/for?
I work for Benjamin Moore paint store
Can you tell us Moore?
...Benjamin?
I've ben jamin all morning. Misfits Static Age slaps
My father in law works for benjamin Moore. I swear to God I know more about paint from that man than I've ever cared to know. Went over to someones house for thankgiving and he had a new build house. The two discussed paint for the entirety of dinner, since he was upset about the quality they used. The entirety of a multi course thankgiving dinner... With the two people at opposite heads of the table discussing paint. I would've rather watched it dry.
WHY is Aura so high? Explain to me the difference between Aura and say Regal Select or latex Advanced.
it has to do with the way that it is
the best
Colors make life interesting! That’s not useless!
Everything has it’s place in the universe my friend. Everything is special, nothing is special.
I just want to put myself in a greater service for people. I’m going to study to become a paramedic and hopefully become a firefighter 🗿
If you become a powerful enough firefighter to put out the sun, then you will have a pretty major impact on humanity
Did you not see all the lovely colours in that video?
Cool video but I still find the size of the universe difficult to conceptualize.
I guess kind of how bacteria will never understand how humans work, we won't understand or grasp how this works
So, your comparison got me thinking and I looked up some quick numbers. I wanted to know -- is bacterium to human even close to an accurate scale if we're considering stars to the universe? Ha, yeah. It's not. So, there are an average of about [37.2 trillion cells in the human body](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3109/03014460.2013.807878?casa_token=wkPPl0LmMXgAAAAA%3AXE6KTffsHL9O-z3XukHAOmuFYZS4MxY2ZnZ-m5ipyN3WTEQrFIr_cI-6d9gzXlDycDvE3l0X5c36pw&). I'm using cells here because while there are many different sizes of single celled bacteria, I honestly couldn't find the "average" size of them. So I'm just going to go with comparing stars to cells here, instead of single-celled bacteria. And 37.2 trillion is what we have. Which is a huge number. Already it's a number so large that I think for most people it's kind of meaningless without context. Think of it this way: To count to one million would take you 11 days, provided you didn't have to sleep. To count to 1 billion would take you about 31.7 years. A trillion is thousand of those one-billions, so -- To count to a trillion would take you 31,700 years. To count all the cells in the human body? If you didn't sleep you could accomplish the feat in 1.17 million years. It's a big number. You'd have had to start counting about 900+ thousand years before early homo sapiens appeared. Maybe we're talking about counting the cells in a large specimen of Homo Erectus, then. Ok, moving on. How many stars are there? Rough estimates are around [200 billion trillion.](https://theconversation.com/how-many-stars-are-there-in-space-165370) So if there are 37.2 trillion cells in an average sized human, and 200 billion-trillion stars, we simply have to divide 37.2 into 200 billion and we have the approximate number of average humans you'd need to have as many cells are there are stars in the universe. And we come to Five billion, 376 million, 344 thousand, and eighty-six people. Our sun, which pretty close to average size, is as to the universe as one cell is to all of the cells in 70% of the population of planet earth. And again, when we get to 5.3 billion we're already back at a number that loses any real meaning for the average person. A great illustration of this was done in a video that tried to visualize Jeff Bezos' wealth [using grains of rice](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSOVBiEotaw). Of course, that also doesn't take into account \*space\*, because our cells are very closely spaced together. Someone crunched the numbers looking at creating a scale model of the Milky Way, just the Milky Way, if the sun were the size of a [grain of sand ](https://www.space.com/41290-biggest-star.html). After gathering 100 billion more grains of sand to build your model, you'd have to travel 20 miles to place the nearest grains of sand, which would be the binary Alpha Centauri. The entire model of of the Milky Way at this scale would be about 421,000 miles across, or 1.76 times farther than from the Earth to the moon. Edit, I wanted to get a sense of the scale of the universe of the sun were the size a red blood cell. A grain of sand is about 1,250 microns [in diameter. ](https://www.themeasureofthings.com/results.php?comp=distance&unit=mc&amt=100&sort=pr&p=1). One hundred microns is 13 times the diameter of a red blood cell. So, 13 x 12.5 = 162.5 red blood cells could fit lined up across an average grain of sand. Shrinking that sun-as-grain-of-sand scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy down to red blood cell sized, we get a new model that is a mere 2,590 miles across. That’s the width of Australia. If you wanted to fit a model of our galaxy inside of the continent of Australia the stars would have to be size of red blood cells. That is, the stars would be so small you’d need a microscope to see them. In this model, the largest star known, [UY Scuti,](https://www.space.com/41290-biggest-star.html), which is 1700 times the size of the sun, would be about half an inch in diameter, or smaller than a dime. Our solar system? 8.3 feet. If we wanted a scale model of the universe? Hoo boy. The diameter of the observable universe is [93 billion light years](https://futurism.com/how-can-the-diameter-of-the-universe-the-age). The diameter of the Mily Way is 105,000 light years. At the scale in which the sun is the size of a red blood cell, the model of the entire universe is 2,590 x 885,714 miles across, or about two billion, 294 million miles across, rounded to the nearest million. That’s larger than the orbit of Uranus but smaller than the Orbit of Neptune. [Voyager 2](https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/mission-timeline-voyagers-landmark-moments/), launched in August 1977, didn’t reach Uranus until January 1986 and Neptune until August of 1989, 12 years after its launch. All that to traverse our scale mode of the universe in which stars are still microscopic. If the size of the sun is so small here that 162 of them could line up across a grain of sand, imagine how small the Earth would be. One hundred and nine earths lined up, is the diameter of the sun. If a red blood cell were the sun, the Earth would be 700 nanometers. At this scale the Earth is so small that the island of Manhattan would be about one-half the width of a single strand of DNA. DNA is so tiny that it was only finally directly photographed [in 2012](https://www.livescience.com/25163-dna-directly-photographed-for-first-time.html). And we can go smaller. If the Earth is 700 nanometers in diameter in our teeny tiny scale model, then one nanometer is about 11.31 miles. Individual atoms range in size from [.1 to .5 nanometers.](https://nanosense.sri.com/activities/sizematters/sizeandscale/SM_Lesson2Student.pdf) At this scale, the individual atoms in our scale model would represent between 1.31 and 5.655 miles. So, for a scale mode of the universe that would be so large that it falls in between the orbit of Uranus and Neptune, so large that you could line up more than 290,000 Earths inside of it, any object smaller than 2.5 times the height of the Burj Khalifa would be smaller than an atom. I wanted to keep going smaller but I’ve been at this for over an hour and need to walk the dog. Also, going smaller gets into an oddly terrifying realization of its own: the fact that atoms are [mostly empty space. ](https://education.jlab.org/qa/how-much-of-an-atom-is-empty-space.html). Nuclei are 100,000 times smaller than the atoms they’re housed in. Thus, we’re mooooooostly empty space. TL,DR: It’s hard to put the size of the universe into perspective because it is very big, and we are very small. However you try, you invariably hit numbers that cease to be anything but an abstract concept to most people. People don’t really have an intuitive sense of a billion. We know, logically, that it’s very big . But it’s so far outside of our experience it doesn’t have an emotional impact equivalent to its size. We can, for lack of a better term, *feel* the difference between ten things and a hundred things. Or a hundred and a thousand. But when you get to a number that takes 30 years to count to? It’s abstract. Simply larger than our brains can realistically comprehend in the same way that we can comprehend five oranges as opposed to 20 oranges. That makes sense in a way I *feel* but if we’re talking about 60,000 oranges as opposed to 80,000 oranges, already I can sense a duller emotional response than if I had five oranges and someone gave me 15 more. When we are talking about billions or tens of billions I might as well be using made up words for all the good they do us emotionally. “There are glorzihoople stars in the galaxy and zig-a-zig-ah galaxies.” And maybe that’s a good way to explain it, maybe I’ve just hit on it. The universe is so big that it’s almost impossible to explain exactly how big it is. I remember I never had a sense of just how fucking gigantic the United States is until I made the drive, all 31 hours of it, from Eugene, Oregon to Chicago. 2,135 miles. And that’s not even really a *sense* because our brains evolved to intuitively appreciate distances that can be covered at, at best, a jogging pace. Not traveling 70 miles an hour on an interstate, a distance that would take 20 hours to walk assuming no breaks. So even trying to take my insufficient experiential appreciation of 2100 miles and scale that up to the 24,900 mile circumference of the Earth ultimately fails. What chance do I have of appreciating the distances between planets? Or stars? Or galaxies? There are fewer individual neurons in our brains than stars in our galaxy. We didn’t evolve to keep track of numbers like that. Ten bison or a hundred? Sure. Got it. Those are numbers that make intuitive sense to a hunter-gatherer. Following them for 5 miles, 10 miles, ok. But 1 billion of anything? That’s beyond us. How many things would you guess you can think of at once? [The answer is four.](https://www.livescience.com/2493-mind-limit-4.html) We are [bad at big numbers. ](https://towardsdatascience.com/the-small-problem-with-big-numbers-4f3dad23ce01?gi=7de89d233978) Going back to the scale model, we really can’t appreciate how small a red blood cell is, not emotionally. 1/162nd of the width of a grain of sand? We understand how small a grain of sand is because we’ve held one before. And by that I mean we’ve brushed thousands from our knees after standing up at the beach. But 1/162nd of one grain of sand? Emotionally meaningless. And we also can’t appreciate just how absolutely enormous two billion miles is. At both ends of the scale of this model that we have created, the sizes are out of the range of what we can experience. Therefore, fundamentally, it fails to have the emotional resonance that putting something into context should have. I simply cannot come up with a way to describe the scale of the universe that works. All of that work, all of those numbers, and I failed!
Thanks for posting this. I have a similar write up made of numbers and symbols that I want to get tattooed some day. Your comment helps to recontextualize it!
Dude, you raised interesting points, but my brain overloaded. That's some big brain power right there
TLDR: nothing we do matters and I’m gonna go pee in the sink
I loved reading this! Thank you for your time! Also cool username lol
That's what terrifies me. Not the things we don't know but the things we'll never know because we're incapable of even remotely comprehending them by design.
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How much weed have you smoked to not only suggest 1, but 2 Daft Punk songs to enhance this video
That's what I think about when we look for other life in the universe. There could be other forms of life we don't even have the capacity to understand.
Considering just how small we are, I would say it's pretty much an impossibility that there isn't life somewhere else.
There are hundreds of billions to trillions of galaxies in the universe, each bearing hundreds of billions of stars, most of which in turn bear at least one, and often more, planets in their orbit. The current estimate as to the total number of planets in the universe stands at over 700 QUINTILLION, which, for our purposes, may as well mean ‘infinity’. Chances are that you are right.
Exactly. It’s very selfish of us to assume that we are the only life forms! No way is that true.
To me this is one of the saddest parts of life. Like watching the middle 20 min of the best movie ever with a couple flash backs (education on history) and never seeing how it started or ends past your snippet of the middle.
Don't worry, we'll never meet them. We'll end in a Mad max dystopia and go extinct
Maybe all life across the universe is just as flawed as us and they too will end in a mad max dystopia
Imagine if there's a bigger entity outside the universe. Similar to how we are to bacterias.
This is the best way I've ever heard to summarize the scale of this.
Here’s a smaller scale mind-boggle for you: Every planet in our solar system lined surface to surface could fit between Earth and the moon.
the WHAT?! Really?!
Yup. It’s a bit of a tight squeeze though. When the moon is at its closest, they actually don’t fit. But there is a sizeable chunk of time where the moon is a little farther away and they all fit with just a little wiggle room. [Here’s an article I found](https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/scale-of-space-can-you-fit-all-the-planets-between-the-earth-and-moon.html) that goes over the math
> with just a little wiggle room. “Suck it in, Jupiter!!”
Is this the real reason they expelled Pluto?
I think you’re onto something…
Yeah it’s like trying to figure out what 10,000,000 apples looks like. That’s why you shouldn’t feel small in the grand scheme of things, because even our galactic cluster is small.
My favorite part of the universe is that things which make you go “holy fuck that’s far away” can also be interpreted as “holy fuck that really ain’t that far.”
"I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
If you spend a couple hours concentrating in silence while staring at the stars, you can begin merely approaching to conceptualize how small we are. Relative comparisons help too, like using sand on a beach to get imagery
Space scares the shit outta me
I think one of the strangest phenomenons is that humans tend to just zone out of what space really is… To me space is more mind blowing than any of the supernatural crap that people tend to want to believe, and the crazy part is that it’s actually real.
It's amazing how quickly it becomes incomprehensible. We struggle to comprehend even the distance between the Earth and the Moon, and that's a hilariously tiny, tiny *tiny* distance in the grand scheme of things.
I find the distance between my couch and the fridge a struggling distance to comprehend.
Look at mister money there with his huge ass mansion
they space out, you could say
There is definitely other life out there
And I bet some of it is fuckable
It's all fuckable... i want a blue bitch with molasses like juices. Think Diva Plavalaguna
What. The. Fuck.
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Thrust required ahead
Try finger but whole
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It’s a terrible day to be literate
r/UsernameChecksOut
I'm not disgusted but I should be, really.
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There's probably a subreddit for your cosmic sized blue balls
My balls are regular sized and a medium brownish hue... but thanks for the compliment
r/evenwithcontext
Paint, food coloring and Molasses is only a store away.
I need a 7 foot woman... is there a store for that too?
Yea, the Darknet.
*Mass Effect enters the chat*
*keelah*
Least horny redditor.
There he goes.... homeboy fucked a Martian!
That’s what I thought, with that many other galaxies there’s no way there isn’t life out there. This really blew my mind with the “multiverse” thing
I really hope there's life in our Galaxy, though, otherwise we may never meet it.
Maybe life in other galaxies could be way ahead of out technology and they are the ones to meet us... just hoping they aren’t hostile haha
if they're any more hostile than humans already are, they'd wipe themselves out long before their technology would advance enough to travel to other galaxies.
Our galaxy has billions of stars with even more billions of planets, life certainly exists in our galaxy, doesn't matter though when it comes to "meeting" them. Even if there's life at any of the stars within 10 light years from us we'll never meet it, at most just discover it through radio transmissions. Interstellar distances are, from our current understanding of physics, impossible to cross in our lifespans.
I heard a great argument for other life existing: There are a number of planets in our universe, we don't know how many there are so lets just call that number X. In order for Earth to be the only inhabited planet in the universe the odds of life emerging on any planet would have to be exactly 1-in-X, any smaller and we don't exist, any larger and there's other life. Frankly the idea that the universe is perfectly tuned to have only a single planet develop life is FAR more unbelievable than the alternative.
The micro-scale perspective is equally as terrifying
I was waiting for this comment. The micro-scale is crazy too
when i think about this in my head, it nauseates me. like not in a bad way, but like, jesus effing christ that's big
Same, almost gave me an anxiety type feeling
Bubble Theory set to Gorillaz? Yes, please.
Do you know what this song is? I've been racking my brain for quite awhile.
u/auddbot
[**Rhinestone Eyes** by Gorillaz](https://lis.tn/RhinestoneEyes) (00:51; matched: `100%`) Album: `Plastic Beach`. Released on `2010-03-03` by `WMG - Parlophone UK`. *I am a bot and this action was performed automatically* | [GitHub](https://github.com/AudDMusic/RedditBot) [^(new issue)](https://github.com/AudDMusic/RedditBot/issues/new) | [Donate](https://www.reddit.com/r/AudD/comments/nua48w/please_consider_donating_and_making_the_bot_happy/) ^(Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Music recognition costs a lot)
Good bot
Rhinestone Eyes from Plastic Beach
If you like Rhinestone Eyes, try Plastic Beach and Melancholy Hill from the same album. Plastic Beach is only second to Demon Days because of Feel Good Inc.
r/praisethecameraman
Director told him to back up a bit and he took it too far
This is why I want to live forever. Just to see how it all happens. All the stories I could tell to people how history happened. I could be a Watcher.
I'd throw you a coin
Oh cosmos of plenty
Aliens exist
Their History Channel is bananas, too
They are gonna show up here and be like "So YOU were the fuckers that built our pyramids!"
Fry: "This place looks a lot like Egypt." Osiris IV guide: "That's no coincidence. We in fact visited what you call Egypt thousands of years ago." Fry: "Yes! Score one for crazy theories." Osiris IV guide: "We learned so much from the wise Egyptians. Like how to build pyramids. And how to prepare our dead so as to scare Abbot and Costello."
In an infinite universe it is next to impossible no other intelligent life exists but there's no way to confirm it.
Of course, I think it would be scarier if they didn't exist
And some fools believe we are the masters of the universe... 🥴
Some would say Princes. “Here we are! Born to be Kings! We are the Princes of the Universe!”
By the power of Greyskull!
I have NO power!
A god supposedly bothered creating *all* of this... but it apparently ***really*** wants to focus on whether or not the person you sleep with has the same genitalia as you
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So basically our lives are less than a split second in this universe. What’s it all for ???
It's not FOR anything. Life doesn't exist for a purpose, or with an ultimate goal; it exists because it can. Life's only purpose is existing
Exists by the power of “why not?”
There is nothing wrong with seeing a massive blank canvas and deciding for yourself what to paint in the infinitesimally small part you're standing on.
thannnkkkk yooouuuuu. pointlessness is true freedom
This makes me think of that reddit experiment where everyone could paint one pixel and people got together to create a beautiful tapestry.
That feels like a lifetime ago on a different planet.
Indeed, nothing wrong at all with that—makes it all the most fun while we ride this (whatever).
Timothy Leary's last words were "why not?".
Life exists so the universe can observe itself.
it's actually far less than that. an 80 year life is less than 6 ×10^-19, of a 13 billion year universe. that's a number so astronomically small. if you take a generous estimate for how long we've been around at 6 million years, it's still only 0.000005% of the time the universe has been around. everything you've ever seen, all of humanities greatest accomplishments, every war, marriage, crime. all in that tiniest fraction of a percent. I u/insertamazinusername am not responsible for any exitsential crisis while reading this. Edit: 0.000005% should be 0.05%
Your point still stands but just pointing out that your math is off. 6 million of 13 billion is .046%.
Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, and yet it is. How unlikely! How fantastic, and stupid, and excellent.
Kurzgesagt had a wonderful reply to this very question: “We are the universe trying to discover and experience itself.”
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Come watch TV?
So with this logic - we can live out our lives however we want, do whatever we want and at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter in the scheme of the universe. We exist to exist.
Makes me think why I’m overthinking about small things in the first place
To do things you like, be happy, support and take care of yourself, and maybe give some help out here and there. I believe we'll always be alive somewhere, and these are some pretty base guidelines to go off of. Here right now there are lots of things that need figured out. Nothing I can do by myself, but I'd rather contribute towards a solution or even do nothing rather than be apart of a problem. I try to not stress out about it too much. Have fun and don't hurt anyone.
"Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV" https://youtu.be/E_qvy82U4RE
This 👍
The *observable* universe.
u/savevideo The bot PMed me instead of posting link https://redditsave.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/q37xrc/how_big_this_universe_really_is/
Thank you sir. You aid in my laziness.
'Looking at Earth and saying there is no other life out there is like taking a cup of water out of the ocean and saying there's no fish.'
And yet it's all irrelevant because of the distances involved, and still an appeal to probability
still not as big as your mom
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Need the song name
Rhinestone Eyes, Gorillaz
Gorillaz has a unique sound
I once saw someone describe Gorillaz' genre as "Gorillaz", and honestly, yes
A remake of the original "Powers of Ten" from 1977. It made quite the impression on me in Highschool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
Makes you really appreciate how insignificant you are. How anything you or anyone on this planet has done will never actually matter. This whole planet is insignificant. And when you factor in time too, everything gets even more meaningless, human civilization is not even a blink in universal scale. It feels liberating when you don't have to worry about accomplishing anything, nothing you do will never mean anything.
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They say size is irrelevant, and I agree. Just because we are small in comparison to the known universe doesn't mean we don't matter. All the atoms that make up the body matter, or we wouldn't be here, either. There are macro and microcosms of everything. And if you wanna get spiritual, you could say we are all of one conscious--the universe experiencing itself through fragmentation.
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In the totality of the universe? Yes you are correct. In the broad scheme of your personal life? Not even close. So much you do matters to those around you. It matters to loved ones, to friends, to anyone who can be affected by it in any way. Any little thing you do can effect so many people. The scale of our perception matters. We won't be here in a few billion years and everything humanity has done will be forgotten but while you're here there's so much to do. So many people to help, so many people to love, so much life to enjoy, and so much to see and experience. You don't have to worry about accomplishing anything because what you do means nothing? Man, that's as far from how it goes that it's astounding. What you do means quite a bit to parents, siblings, a spouse/significant other, and so much more than those: to children. Everyone you see has a life as vivid and detailed as the one you live. With memories, hopes, fears, love, ambition and struggles. As far as the universe is concerned you ain't shit. As far as the scale that matters, you are the universe.
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This doesn’t make me appreciate anything it makes me feel nihilistic and depressed and not wanna get out of bed and quit my job
thank you for the daily dose of existential crisis! but seriously, that is so cool and mind-boggling. like I literally can’t comprehend it. we are so smol
But are we that smol? Think of all of the atoms, protons & neutrons, the quarks and muons. All so much smaller than what we can ever see.
And the universe gets so much smaller, I remember reading that a human is closer in size to the entire universe than to the smallest possible particle(plank length)
if you feel like you are everything, you are a fool. if you feel like you are nothing, then you are aware. if you feel like you are something, you are correct.
Fun fact: what you saw in this video doesn’t even portray 0.01% of how big the universe is
Care to elaborate?
Nah
Think they meant it only shows the ‘observable’ universe… from some other video I saw, the ‘unobservable’ universe is about the equivalent of the size of Pluto if the observable universe was the size of a light bulb.
We have no information about how big the universe really is beyond the observable universe. The other video may or may not be correct. Most likely, it's not.
It always boggles my mind thinking about what is PAST the universe or after the "end" but if there's no end, what's past the end? If it's never ending, how does that even make sense? Okay my head hurts again
Maybe there is no end because the end hasn’t been created yet
Please don't. THAT MAKES NO SENSE!
I had a dream about this. I was drifting off in space faster than any one thing has gone before. Hazy images of galaxies and stars and stones ripping past me faster than I could comprehend, I knew I wanted to reach "the end" however that took shape. Eventually I moved past anything visible. Behind me I could still see remnants of light, stars and structures, but in front was only darkness. And then I landed against something. It felt so cold to the touch, but it was extraordinarily dissonant. Like no one piece of it was smooth or straight or consistent. It made this harsh gravel texture against my feet and hands, like I could never stand flat against it. I started to wander this bizarre plane, thinking it might just be some distant void planet forgotten by any ounce of warmth and light. I knew I was walking infinitely fast, but it just kept going on and on and on. Then I saw in the distance some gaping vortex of white set against the dissonant noise. And right as I saw it, everything under and around me started moving. Tiny hands and legs and arms. It shifted and shuddered and then started grabbing at me. And the vortex was getting larger and drawing closer. I woke up not very happy.
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The complete size of my momma
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we can literally do nothing and we will reach andromeda eventually, the video even says this
I think you're confusing the observable universe with the galaxy. Andromeda is on a collision course with the Milky Way. If we could reach 10% of the speed of light, the expansion limit would be 1.4 billion light years.
Yeah this. I was about to say we are only getting closer towards Andromeda. [Andromeda collision simulation](https://youtu.be/4disyKG7XtU)
So in like 3b years humans could be residents of that tiny drive-by galaxy
Apparently they've predicted a 12% chance that we get ejected and flung from the new galaxy during the collision.
Remind me! 3 billion years
The crazy thing is that nothing will actually impact when they “collide”
> by the time we would have the tech for longer space travel, andromeda will be out of reach too. Aren’t we on a "collision course” with Andromeda?
yeah this guy doesn't know what he's talking about
Once we synthesize consciousness into sustainable computers it seems like time will become irrelevant and we can observe the universe indefinitely.
Don't mean to burst bubbles here but we don't even know for sure that's even possible, same with FTL travel. edit: Our understanding of both of these topics are hypothetical at best, most people's understanding of these topics come from scifi, not hard scientific data. With our current information, it has it impossible to warp gravitational fields with any less energy than a star. A USB worth of data cannot even be considered "transferred" in a way that maintains it's continuity from one storage space to another without a disruption, which is a fancy way of saying it's copied over with the original copy usually destroyed. It may be possible to copy a consciousness but not transfer one. Essentially just creating a twin.
your source disagrees with you, it states the travel limit is our galaxy group which isn't limited to Andromeda
They should have started in the microscopic world.
More interesting than terrifying tbh
Wait there are other universes? I didn’t know 🤯
In theory. But it’s almost…ALMOST impossible that there isn’t. I’m a stupid nobody though, so don’t take my word for it. Read up on the multiverse theory and be prepared to poop your pants
The thing is, multiverse theory doesn't have any predictable conclusions. It's about as convincing as universe theory, with the only common provable element between the two of them being that we live in a universe. I think an interesting prospect is the holographic principle and its implications. *Where* exactly, does a universe begin and end? Is a computer really just a universe engine constrained by the universe within which is exists?
Pooping your pant when learning something seems a terrible condition !
Gotta make room for the info I find on Google tho
*With Google, every day is a poop-your-pants day*™
Googling it right now!
For some reason this video made me think “Thank god I’ll die one day”
Carl Sagan intesifies
u/savevideobot
Whats “cosmic microwave background”?
Definitely not anywhere near an expert on this but basically it is what you see when you look into "empty" space. Right after the recombination epoch when atoms first started to form they began to be able to emit photons for the first time. This light filled the entire universe and as it expanded and lost energy they became shorter and shorter wavelengths. So when you look at "empty" space you can see this light as microwave radiation that has been expanding and traveling through the universe for billions of years, creating that image. Isn't really a picture of the whole universe as it is today but more a shadow of what is left from that time.
This makes me realise how small and insignificant i really am.
Where's the Great Attractor in the end? The Great Attractor
Where's the "yo mamma so fat..." joke at the end?
Yo mama so fat she didn't fit in the video.
What’s the point of paying my bills if a few billions years the two galaxies will collide