Powers of Ten

[Asteroid-Man]

I thought this was incredible!

[FONT=arial, helvetica, geneva][SIZE=-1]"View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons."

Java demonstration
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

Video
http://youtube.com/watch?v=b8zrlOGKI2E

Simpsons Spoof
http://youtube.com/watch?v=QNaMLu-Wf-w
[/SIZE][/FONT]

 

[mightiest_mortal]

Thats sooo gonna be what Google earth will be like in 20 years, only then itl be called Google Universe!!

 

[Honey Vibe]

Very humbling.

 

[PhotoJones]

i can't even begin to wrap my mind around that...makes me feel both less than a speck and more than a mountain...

 

[jimmy]

I thought this was gonna be a thread about the Shawn Lane album of the same name.

I feel let down.

 

[Asteroid-Man]

All i could thing after seeing this is "i feel small" and not with a capital "i" cause that symbolizes being big or of some importance etc. compared to the universe i'm nothing.

 

[Selene]

Wow that kind of stuff is so interesting.. Science sure has evolved over the years. very mind boggeling.

 

[Addendum]

From The Hitchhiker's Guide:

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.

Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.

Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.

For 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 marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here."

The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain--since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation--every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

 

[Mr. Credible]

i can't even begin to wrap my mind around that...makes me feel both less than a speck and more than a mountain...

oddly enough, i feel the same way.

weird.

 

[Mr. Credible]

and you know what? i'm actually, physically jealous of future generations for (supposedly) getting to see all that crap out there... the planets, the aliens, intelligent life, etc... i mean, hopefully, in the next 70 years we'll get to see something, but i kind of doubt it, and for that, i'm jealous of my children's children's children's children. oh well... at least i saw the birth of the internet, and cable tv.

 

[Mr. Credible]

why don't we send a space-station outward into the universe, with men and women astronauts (no diapers, please), and have them just... travel, and have kids, and grow food, and whatever else they need to survive until they find intelligent life? i mean, it's a long shot, sure, but i'd do it... why not?

i've never watched star trek, but i'd assume it's be kind of like that. only without phasers.

 

[Super Kal]

no source of unlimited means of fuel...

 

[Mr. Credible]

no source of unlimited means of fuel...

well, i'm no rocket scientist, but once you got a space ship going so many miles per hour in space, aka: nothingness, wouldn't it just keep on that same speed? with nothing to really slow it down?

or, find a way to make it speed up on like, solar winds, or something? i'm sure nasa could do some stuff like that. those guys are kinda' smart.

 

[Super Kal]

being cramped in a space station... does that sound like something you want to do for the rest of your life?

also, you're gonna need an unlimited means of oxygen to do something like that, and right now, nothing can do that.

 

[Mr. Credible]

being cramped in a space station... does that sound like something you want to do for the rest of your life?

also, you're gonna need an unlimited means of oxygen to do something like that, and right now, nothing can do that.

um... plants can. just have a fairly large green house on your space station, and you're good.

 

[Mr. Credible]

being cramped in a space station... does that sound like something you want to do for the rest of your life?

also, you're gonna need an unlimited means of oxygen to do something like that, and right now, nothing can do that.

if it meant my name would go down in history as one of the guys that went into outer space to search out intelligent life/whatever.... yeah, i'd totally do it... there are worse things to be known for.

 

[Super Kal]

um... plants can. just have a fairly large green house on your space station, and you're good.

okay, good point... and what about water?