Scale of the Universe | Hacker News Reader

Scale of the Universe

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194 pointschandrew80 comments

"What is a man in the infinite? But to show him another prodigy no less astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let him take a mite which in its minute body presents him with parts incomparably more minute; limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops; let him, again dividing these last, exhaust his power of thought; let the last point at which he arrives be that of which we speak, and he will perhaps think that here is the extremest diminutive in nature. Then I will open before him therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the enclosure of this diminished atom. Let him therein see an infinity of universes of which each has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and at the last the mites, in which he will come upon all that was in the first, and still find in these others the same without end and without cessation; let him lose himself in wonders as astonishing in their minuteness as the others in their immensity; for who will not be amazed at seeing that our body, which before was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, a whole, in regard to the nothingness to which we cannot attain."

-Blaise Pascal, 1669

Les vertiges de Pascal. Excellent choice.

Nice!

Trying to comprehend the scale of the universe is deeply unsettling, especially when thinking about our minute, insignificant part of it.

Anyway, I hope the startup you're killing yourself over is going well!

I disagree that any part of the universe is insignificant. We're all important.

If everyone is important than no one is.

False dichotomy? :P

important with respect to the universe, not eachother

One person being important doesn't negate anyone or anything else from being important. This is not the same as "everyone is special."

Depends on whether you are comparing everyone to each other or to something outside of the group of everyone. I could imagine we would say that everyone is important as compared to a typical stray photon with a duel-identity crisis.

False. A group's ability to survive a cataclysmic event, natural catastrophe, epidemic, or genocide depends on its size and diversity. There is safety in numbers and diversity.

I suppose that depends on how you define "important". We're pretty important to ourselves, I suppose.

Consider also that not only are we very, very, minute and insignificant; we are also exceedingly brief!

We might be insignificant on a physical scale but that's not the right measure to use.

We are actually very very significant. We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

This whole enormous universe? It's for us. (And other intelligences, if they exist.)

> We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

Yes, but that could be quite common as well. The universe could be littered with intelligent beings who all think exactly this.

And every one of them is (probably) tiny, and every one is important.

Consciousness and life are two miracles of existence that neither the galaxies, nor the atoms seem to manifest. Probably most life forms on earth are not conscious either.

From that point of view we seem to be a miraculous needle in the haystack of the universe as we know it.

At this point I think current opinion is that pretty much all mammals are consciousness. It's not that rare.

Yah I read that silly article too. They call them conscious because they redefined the term. It's nonsense.

Which article is that?

They may not be self-aware, but it seems reasonable to assume that animals like dogs (for example) have inner lives, after their own fashion, and are capable of experiencing qualia. Certainly more reasonable than to assume that they can't.

I guarantee you other animals are first-class conscious. I can't prove it to you, but that's a problem with epistemology, not a problem with the other animals.

It's probably because the only animals YOU ever see are the ones in your dining plate. If you studied animal behavior a little you'd maybe realize how wrong you are.

Even fishes, too.

The property of the universe to become capable of self reflection after billions of years of non-intervention is just mind blowing. Life is the most amazing thing. It's as if life and consciousness are inherent emergent properties of certain systems. If you create a complicated enough state machine with low enough entropy (i.e. the universe), the ability to self reflect simply seems to emerge after a while. It's as if life just wants to exist. Amazing.

As for animal consciousness, there are probably degrees of that. Humans are probably the only living beings on Earth that are capable of higher order reasoning and self reflection (meta-thinking). That's not to say animals aren't conscious; they probably just aren't able to reason about the world and their own existence the same way we are (since their brains aren't as developed). In the same vein, who is to say there aren't beings in this universe capable of reasoning on such a high level that even with sufficient explanations, our brains wouldn't be able to accommodate such reasoning on the biological/hardware level due to a lack of proper circuitry.

Life and consciousness are not the properties of a complex state machine, but the properties of the universe.

The universe is not the mathematics or physics that we use to describe it.

Universe is just a complex digital state machine transitioning from one state to another. This existence is digital in nature.

We may never know what the universe really is.

> We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!

Note that the dung beetle uses the Milky Way to navigate! :)

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/24/dung-beet...

Scroll the slider to the left and we are HUGE.

> to comprehend the scale of the universe is deeply unsettling, especially when thinking about our minute, insignificant part of it

Humans are 10^27 times smaller than the observable universe, and 10^24 times bigger than the neutrino, presently the smallest observable thing, and 10^35 times bigger than the smallest theoretical distance, the Planck length. That puts humans around the center of the Universe's scale, hardly minute and insignificant, and one could argue on that basis the human brain, even mind, is at the conceptual center of the Universe!

Yeah, we're at the center of everything we can observe. That seems to make sense. It might seem the same way from the point of view of a neutrino =)

A neutrino isn't conscious.

You should really play around with this, if you haven't. Going at speed through the galaxy Star Trek-style felt very freaky:

http://en.spaceengine.org/

I imagine the experience would be so much better in VR.

Your comment just made me smile and exhale with a sigh of relief. You hit my sentiment exactly. Sometimes I don't know why we waist it all for silly business ventures instead of enjoying the splendor that the universe has to offer. It's baffling to me. Though, starving sucks, but do we need to try so hard to do such insignificant things (in general)? It's probably why I won't spend my time trying to write another Tetris clone in some obscure language; it's been done, move on. :-) Let's make a real difference so we can spend time reflecting and getting our minds blown by reality.

When I was a little kid, I used to lay in my bed, in the dark, and think about the size of the room around me. Then I'd think of the size of my house, then the size of my hometown, then the size of my home state, then the size of the United States, then the size of the planet, and so on until I couldn't conceive of the scale of what I was trying to envision.

It was at once exciting and absolutely terrifying. This doesn't quite capture that feeling, but it's still pretty neat.

It is terrifying, which is interesting to analyze. Why should it be? Must be something deeply ingrained in us humans.

I wonder if it is an instinctive reaction:

a large new space has a lot of unknowns -> some of these unknowns could be dangerous -> a very large new space has a lot more unknowns -> very large spaces are to be feared.

This is based on nothing more than my imagination, but seems like a sensible evolutionary precaution.

I tend to think that it is instinctual, probably related to the vastness of the thing, and the fact that it is simply beyond our ability to grasp completely.

I used to do the same. Even now, thinking about the scale of very large things can be unsettling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Yi58jtNdY

Fascinating! Since childhood to this day, I use that same technique to ease myself into falling asleep. Personally, I see it as more relaxing than terrifying.

For me, terrifying can be read as a synonym for thrilling. It didn't scare me so much as fill me with awe, and delight, and any number of contradictory feelings.

Unfortunately, nowadays, I fall asleep much too quickly to contemplate the nature of universal size like I used to be able.

Everytime I see one of these things, I think of "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" and the Total Perspective Vortex:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex#Total_...

> The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore... which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is. When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

A few of my 3D renders on the topic of scale:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg

- http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/

It is incredible to consider that the largest known stars are the size of the Solar System.

The pictures of the largest stars are not realistic, since they show a clear border of a solid object. In reality the out parts are more like a very thin atmosphere. The average density of the whole star is almost vacuum( 1000 times less than earth atmosphere ).

True; an entirely accurate model would be quite time-consuming. For example, a red giant's photosphere is not spherical.

Niel deGrasse Tyson offered the following feedback:

> If the Sun's Wien's law curve peaked just a few Angstroms over from it's current value would you have illustrated it green? But of course there are no green stars even though the curve peaks there for plenty of them.

> The width of the visible part of the spectrum is so narrow compared with the full-breadth energy distribution of the stars that the fractional difference between one color and the next is quite small. The consequence is that we don't actually see all the colors you show.

- http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~tatum/stellatm.html

- http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9604b/

- http://herschel.cf.ac.uk/results/betelgeuse

- http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/starold_2.html

- http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wien+displacement+law

What software did you use to render these images? They look nice.

http://www.blender.org/

An early and retrogasmic infinity narrative from 1977 is Charles & Ray Eames' POWERS OF 10 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38ti9BJiyvs

Been posted in various forms numerous times over the years.

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=scale+of+the+u...

At least this is the more accurate version at the top end of the scale.

Very well done.

It actually always baffles me that so much of biology takes place on scales that are very close to human perception. When looking at microscope images, the sizes of things become very abstract. Atoms and cells might as well be of the same size.

But a 0.1 mm object is perceptible to the naked eye. This resolution is just an order of magnitude too crude to see individual cells (the human egg cell is just barely visible to the naked eye), and two orders of magnitude cruder than the resolution limit of optical microscopes. Imagine how differently science might have progressed if we had known about cells before inventing the microscope!

Not a plug for Nikon, but their version of this concept is far superior IMO:

http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/

Much better design. But really lacks on objects on the large scales and the automatic pop-ups make the thing almost unbearable to explore.

If the pop-ups make the thing unbearable, how could it have a better design?

You are proposing a false dilemma.

I disagree. The user interface is poorly designed. It immediately slides everything past in a blur. I wanted to look from smallest to largest, but when I click the icon to go to the smallest scale, I'm asked to "restart". If I use the scroll wheel and get to the smallest scale, I'm also asked to restart. When I restart, I'm shown the blur of objects again and have to go through the entire process over again.

Late, but - while it's not optimal, it's far superior to the submitted one, if for no other reason than the continuous scale reference.

Obligatory IBM Powers of Ten (1977): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

I liked the first one, and I think this version is very good looking too. Good job.

I suggest you add a "play" button, where it scrolls from one end to the other at a slow pace, much like in the first iteration. It's nice to sit back and enjoy the view.

I always liked http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

I wish this page worked. Might just be on my end, but I really want to see this. I love the overwhelming feeling of insignificance.

Looks like it was built with Flash, so that could be it. Its a really cool project if you do get a chance to check it out on another device.

Is there not a virtual world which can represent a contiguous series of locations larger than that of Minecraft?

You can try I-War 2:Edge of Chaos( space action-simulator with newton physics and inertia ) where the total contiguous world map is around 10^20 km( at least ). But of course most of it is empty as the solar system takes a relatively small place in the center of the map. And similarly to Minecraft if you teleport yourself into the high numbers you will get experience floating point accuracy problems, and weird things start to happen.

> if you teleport yourself into the high numbers you will get experience floating point accuracy problems, and weird things start to happen

Weird; in case of a space sim this should be a simple thing to fix (octree, for example).

You can't reach such areas without cheating or flying for years, so there is nothing to fix.

Space Kraken, the punisher of cheaters? :).

Not really virtual worlds, but will let you fly through the universe and view it at different scales: http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/ http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

Going from the center of an MC map to the edge would take over a month of continuous walking [1], so I don't think there's much motivation to create anything larger. I have never heard of any situation anyone even reached the end of an MC world without explicitly teleporting there, although one man had been traveling there for the last 3 years [2].

[1] http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands [2] http://farlandsorbust.com/

You must try "Celestia" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/). Its a real-time visualization and simulation of space! OF SPACE! You can see the entire known universe with this!

For anyone with access to an Oculus Rift, I can't recommend "Titans of Space" highly enough. It brought me to tears. The sense of scale you get is utterly amazing.

http://www.crunchywood.com/

That largest bacterium's size is incorrect. It shows a chain of them as 750um, but in reality just one can become that large. In the picture, they look as big as a human ovum at 120um, but obviously that's not accurate.

You hope it's not accurate :D

I was saying that the bacterium is -larger- than the ovum. By a factor of 6.

Actually that being the case why isn't it possible that the universe itself is just a planck scale like entity inside something bigger than us?

There was a link here awhile ago to see visualization s of known. Star systems. Anyone recall that link? Would wait love ro take another tour...

What does it mean by "lengths shorter than this are not confirmed"? We are not sure about the size of objects smaller than it?

Turn off the music and scroll through playing Daft Punk's Recognizer on the Tron soundtrack.

Frequent repost. Old. Karmadecay.

Existential Horror masterpiece.

Wow.

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