The Scale of the Universe

We're small. Stupidly small. There are much bigger things in this universe than you or me, much more powerful and much more fascinating. 


I am in no way trying to insult your intelligence by telling you this, as I have no doubt that you're already fully aware about how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. I just thought I'd try and get you to stop and think about it for a second or more.


So here is my home-made perspective: 


Walking at a quick pace, it will take me 10 minutes to walk 1km and then 1 hour to walk 6km at the same pace. Walk 36km at this pace and I'll finish in 6 hours. 72km = 12 hours and so on. 


Now think about the circumference of the earth at the equator - 40,075.16km around, now divide that by 6km per hour and apparently it would take me 278 days, almost a year, to walk around what is essentially, a small planet. 


I don't have that kind of time to spare.


I only really used 6km/hour as an example because that is about my walking speed on the treadmill at the gym, but that's tiring after an hour. The average human walking speed is approximately 4km/hour, so in actual fact it could take us over a year (417 days) to walk around the world - this is of course if you didn't need to stop, eat or sleep, you could walk on water and didn't you mind a bit of harsh terrain.


As you can see, we are pretty small and walking around the world isn't something you really consider (although it has been considered and then done http://www.blessitt.com).  


Sometimes it even annoys me having to walk down to the shops to buy milk. Mostly because I don't really drink a lot of milk, but also because I wish I could fly - even walking a couple of hundred metres can take up way too much of my valuable time in the day.


Now let's look at this picture. Hello picture.

See how earth is only a fraction the size of beasts like Jupiter or Saturn? Imagine how long it would take to stroll around those mothers. Then there's the big ol' sun, which is vastly greater than any of the pathetic looking planets there. And then of course there are all the other millions of suns out there that would make our sun look like a marble next to a football (the soccer kind silly).


Another interesting thing about our planets, which Bill Bryson kindly enlightened me with in the early chapters of A Short History of Nearly Everything, is the idea that although the picture above is a common way of displaying the scale of our planets in size, it in no way depicts the scale of distance between them.


There is no way we could do that on one piece of paper. In this picture, Jupiter is shown to be only a couple of centimeters away from Earth, with Pluto, just a few after that. In a real sense, if we had Earth depicted as the size of a pea, we would have to place Jupiter about 300 meters away, with Pluto hanging out almost 2.5 kilometers down the road.


It really is an absolutely astonishing perspective and I hope you've enjoyed having a little think about it. 


On that note, I leave you with this website which will hopefully enlighten you even further than Earth from Pluto.


http://scaleofuniverse.com/