The scale of the universe, and everything

http://www.ovni-alerte.com/blog/flash/scale-of-universe.swf

by moblivu • 15 years ago

56 17 15 years ago

lukifer• 15 years ago

I never get tired of playing with this. (Though I can't help but want to port it to HTML5.) ;)

moblivu2• 15 years ago

Seriously, it amazed me everything. You see everything life, from he mesh that holds the very matter to the limits of the universe; and you can control the hole this, with a Flash slider.

Reminds me of the "Known Universe video from AMNH" So eye opening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

michaelcampbell2• 15 years ago

This is one of my favorite "web things" ever. It is an awesome illustration of how fundamentally insignificant we are.

sho_hn• 15 years ago

That's not my take-away when I get to see things like this -- rather, I always find it pretty amazing that something as small as a human brain is capable of holding (rough, admittedly) working models of and reason about something as vast in scale :).

It's a nice dynamic - all that scale and complexity out there, and its mirror image reflection in our tiny heads.

prawn• 15 years ago

I agree with both of you. It's not impossible to be both in awe of our insignificance, and the capabilities of something so puny in the scheme of things.

Jach• 15 years ago

Your post's parent and your reply seem to have come up in every single HN thread where this thing or similar have appeared.

Define your point of reference for significance. Considering we may end up producing the beings and machines that colonize much of the observable universe, I think we can be pretty significant from the view of a hypothetical space monster thousands of lightyears away.

scorpion032• 15 years ago

You don't seem to have scrolled to the left enough. We are 10^36 times that of a planks constant.

Fargren• 15 years ago

This gets posted about once a month here. It's very cool, but still...

qntm• 15 years ago

Also, I'm not impressed by the quality of the vector graphics.

neuromorphic• 15 years ago

This is so beautiful, so sublime, truly one of the jewels of the Web. And yet...

I wonder if anyone else had the same reaction I did, quite a few I would guess. Hmm.

The thing is, it is so enchanting, produces such a sense of wonderment, lulled by the music and so on, that as I approached the end of the sliding scale, with each step the animations taking a few moments to load... I started to think: what is lying in store for me at the very largest scale, what am I going to see? What message is waiting for me? What object gets designated the very largest 'thing' of all?..

...And then it hit me. Oh dear, this is April the 1st, isn't it. In that case, it can really only be one (category of) thing. It's going to be something like "yr mom's ass", or something, isn't it. An object, on whose vast cheeks the known universe is no more than a pimple. Yes.

And if I'd gone in the other direction, well surely I'd find something like "yr dick" waiting in store for me.

Gosh, I'd rather it isn't that, I really don't want it to be that. It was such a beautiful thing. But I see now that it has to be. As they say, it is in-evitable.

So that's what this is then. Just the winning move in some great 'Yo Momma' game between hackers that got way out of hand. I guess that's how marvelous things like this get built sometimes. Like Facebook. Spectacular works of man, haunted - poisoned, perhaps - by the sin of their creation.

Actually, now that I'm getting used to it, I like that in a way. I do like jokes like that. I like to tell jokes like that. Jokes where the humor is produced from a shocking scale mis-match, of truly cosmological proportions. In a way this is truly the Archetype for that kind of joke. And it's all the more exquisite when the only way it is able to spring the surprise, to so perfectly sneak past my joke anticipation detectors, is by the pure chutzpah of simply selecting scales so enormous that they don't register on my dials, and all the while I'm quietly sailing into a punchline. Actually what tipped me off just before I got to the end was the slightly too-good-to-be-true music, gently mocking me (plus my slow browser giving me time to reflect).

And so, as I moved the slider the final stage of its journey to the right hand side, knowing this inevitability, imagine my surprise to find that there was no punchline after all. And lo it was just a pure and beautiful thing, unsullied by cynicism.

moblivu2• 15 years ago

Trust me, this is pure! I was getting something in my bookmarks when I saw that link. I wanted to share this marvelous piece of animation!

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Warning: This link leads directly to a flash file.

intended• 15 years ago

Wow that was cool.

xkcd had done this one - http://xkcd.com/482/

jrockway• 15 years ago

Ugh, it plays music?

The real question is: how big would my monitor need to be to show the whole Universe when I am zoomed into that spacetime fabric?

If we filled the Universe with neutrinos, how many would fit?

grantlmiller• 15 years ago

and i'm stunned...

Rickasaurus• 15 years ago

Where did they get 900 Ym for the estimated size of the entire universe?

The scale of the universe, and everything

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