From time immemorial, science fiction writers and scientists have been telling people the world over about their insignificance in comparison to the hugeness of the universe.
Comic science fiction author Douglas Adams, even made this insignificance a plot point in the first novel in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where an inventor, tired of his wife telling him to get a "sense of proportion", invented a device called the Total Perspective Vortex.
He fed information related to the universe, with its innumerable stars and galaxies, into one end, and put his wife in the other to proportionately represent her in relation to the universe. Basically, this means showing an entire picture of the universe with a sign pointing to one of the stars saying, "You are here". Makes for quite some perspective. The inventor's wife went mad and it later became a torture device.
Now, there's a real life visualisation of the vortex. In 2009, YouTube uploader morn1415 made his hugely viral "Star Size Comparison" video. Seven years later, he is back with a sequel.
The previous video only showed the size differences. The video above includes the distances (in light years), to indicate the real – and incredible – size of the universe. The video is like a version of the Matryoshka doll, starting at the moon and then moving to planets and other celestial bodies larger and larger and larger – before ending up at UY Scuti, a red supergiant that is the largest known star in existence.
With journey of such epic proportions, along with a soundtrack that steadily builds to a crescendo, one cannot help but get philosophical. This video ends by asking, "What if nothing existed?".
Below is another depiction of this size difference. In January 2015, NASA took the largest picture ever taken, combining 1.5 billion pixels, which required 4.3 GB of disk space. The image shows 100 million stars and travels more than 40,000 light years.
Here's science writer Carl Sagan's take on the size of the universe and our relation to it, in his popular "100 Billion Galaxies" speech. "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
There's another video like this with 4.4 million views, proving that we humans probably like to be reminded of our insignificance. It zooms out from the smiling face of a women to 10 billion light years away then comes right back and zooms in to a distance of 1 femtometer – that's one quadrillionth of a meter – from the women's eyes.
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