In the span of a few hundred years, humans have gone from feeling very big — at the center of literally everything — to very small. We can thank science for that shift. Once we had telescopes, we could prove that we were but a dot amid a sparkling tapestry of space. Once we had microscopes, we could prove that life was far more complicated than we thought. Now we have this YouTube video, which very effectively shows that we are small no matter the scale.
The video above from morn1415 is a follow-up to his previous star comparison video that went viral. In it, we start at the scale of heavenly bodies like our own moon, and work up from there. The Earth is dwarfed by other planets in the solar system like Jupiter, which is dwarfed by our sun, which, oddly enough, is dwarfed by some dwarf stars. The video continues with larger and larger stars until we zoom out into a view of our galaxy, the supercluster of galaxies we are apart of, and finally to the observable universe.
Everything is presented very well, from the use of metric units (get with it, my country of origin), to the constantly zooming perspective that hits the point home. It all makes me feel very small, and I’m OK with that. If some of the smallest things in the universe can understand the structure and shape of the universe itself, I’d say that sometimes small can be astounding.
What do you think? Feeling tiny? Let us know in the comments below.
Images: morn1415
