Scale of the Universe
TIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.
This is really moving! It's like a 2020s version of that old video[0] (there are 2!)[1] that zooms in and out of scale.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (1977)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4 (1996)
I love the end of it, just a big circle of random static noise. Looking at stuff like this always brings up the question of why does anything exist at all?
Similar app from https://kurzgesagt.org/ for phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt...
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263...
What's interesting is that they both chose very similar music. Are they somehow related that I am unaware of?
Neal Agarwal (Neal.Fun) did something similar a while back with cool WebGL effects. https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
I never knew that a minecraft world was bigger than Neptune. Very neat.
What I find more interesting is when you get to the subatomic layer when it becomes apparent that it's all just theory and we have no idea what's actually here and we could be wrong but have no way of knowing...yet.
TIL that the Burj Khalifa is taller than Vatican City is wide.
Something I recently posted on Bluesky in response to someone complaining about the exaggerated vertical scale of a relief map of the US:
https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqfzyvoz5...
> It’s worth noting that the coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 3 miles above sea level, so in a 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1 pixel height for Mt Whitney!
> So that difference in elevation is less than the diameter difference of the earth due to its rotation! A billiard ball has a diameter of 2in and the variation in the earth’s diameter scaled to that level would be 0.0066in which is smaller than a dust mite.
> I should also point out that the diagrams that show the earth’s elliptical orbit are also a lie. Drawn correctly proportioned, the earth’s orbit is indistinguishable from a circle to the naked eye. (And don’t get me started on the pictures that overstate the size of sun & planets vs their orbits).
> The universe is huge, we are tiny.
Looks lovely!
Too bad there are no hits when searching for the "Restaurant at the end of the Universe" :)
TIL the porcine virus is only ~106 carbon atoms wide.
Warmly recommended version of the same thing in meditative video game form: Everything
One of the best things I have seen on HN. Thank you for the link and who ever build this !
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5qTdb6LbM ◄ AGE of UNIVERSE ► TIME in perspective
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)
Has this been done with time rather than distance? I’ve always thought it could be a neat way to explore historical topics or quickly get a perspective on certain time periods.
Magnificent! Curious how the zoom interaction is managed? Do you load assets of next level once zoom level hit a certain threshold?
Love the fact that the known universe is much more smaller (10^-35) than it is bigger (10^27) from our chosen baseline.
I also like this site to show the scale of the universe:
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....
This is amazing. I always have this thought experiment of taking this back like 200 years and imaging how people would react to the things we’ve discovered in our world and thinking about how much it would progress the technology of the era.
The gray stuff. Is that where the Level Designers haven't yet created the environment for us to play in?
Seriously though as hard as the size of the universe is to comprehend, the gray stuff is exponentially more mysterious to me.
I always want to see something like this but within the scope of the earth across time.
OMFG! This is fantastic! And apparently I have some things to learn about web design.
How would you determine if the Universe is finite or infinite?
Is the scrolling on mobile way too sensitive for anyone else?
This is all a simulation, folks. The "universe", not the website. I mean, the website is inside the simulation, so it's technically a simulation of the simulation it lives in...
Death cults would be shocked to know this
For a second I thought we'd seen a lot of the universe, the HDF being 1/5th the radius away and on googling Earandel is 2/3rds the radius... of the known universe.
"According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced by Alan Guth and D. Kazanas, if it is assumed that inflation began about 10−37 seconds after the Big Bang and that the pre-inflation size of the universe was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire universe's size is at least 1.5×1034 light-years—at least 3×10^23 times the radius of the observable universe."
So, if true, all those metrics of atoms, stars, planets in the known universe are multiplied by 10^23.
Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once per knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different intelligent species - single planet to galaxy spanning empires - that would probably never meet another intelligent species (except those with the same ancestors).