O.K. An atom (which everything is made up of) is so small that if you lined up half a million of them, they could hide behind a human hair.
If you imagine a milimeter and divide that line into a thousand equal widths... this is about the scale of your typical micro organism. If you wanted to see this mico organism swimming in a drop of water with your naked eye you would have to enlarge the drop of water to 12 m. However, if you wanted to see an atom in the same drop you would have to enlarge the drop of water to 24 kilometers across.
That's really frickin' small.
In contrast, space is rather large. All the planets and the sun and moons and asteroids in our solar system take up about a trillionth of the available space. Every diagram of our solar system you have ever seen is grossly inaccurate... planets are not nicely aligned like they are in school text books. If you wanted to draw a diagram to scale and the earth was the size of a pea, jupiter would be 300 meters away and Pluto would be 2.5 km away. The average distance between stars is 30 million million kilometers. Now how many atoms could you fit in there? If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chance of actually being deposited on a planet is about one in one billion trillion trillion.
Ooooh, I don't know if my brain can handle that. I think a screw or a cog might come loose.
Snd if you travel to the end of the universe...not that you can really, but if you could... you'd end up where you started.
Eh? *scratches head*
And if you think that's interesting, go out and buy 'a short history of nearly everything' by Bill Bryson.
Right. That was a good half an hour procrastinating. What can I do now?
If you imagine a milimeter and divide that line into a thousand equal widths... this is about the scale of your typical micro organism. If you wanted to see this mico organism swimming in a drop of water with your naked eye you would have to enlarge the drop of water to 12 m. However, if you wanted to see an atom in the same drop you would have to enlarge the drop of water to 24 kilometers across.
That's really frickin' small.
In contrast, space is rather large. All the planets and the sun and moons and asteroids in our solar system take up about a trillionth of the available space. Every diagram of our solar system you have ever seen is grossly inaccurate... planets are not nicely aligned like they are in school text books. If you wanted to draw a diagram to scale and the earth was the size of a pea, jupiter would be 300 meters away and Pluto would be 2.5 km away. The average distance between stars is 30 million million kilometers. Now how many atoms could you fit in there? If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chance of actually being deposited on a planet is about one in one billion trillion trillion.
Ooooh, I don't know if my brain can handle that. I think a screw or a cog might come loose.
Snd if you travel to the end of the universe...not that you can really, but if you could... you'd end up where you started.
Eh? *scratches head*
And if you think that's interesting, go out and buy 'a short history of nearly everything' by Bill Bryson.
Right. That was a good half an hour procrastinating. What can I do now?
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By the way me and a friend might be coming your way this summer, I have already made plans to visit some of my other sg friends if you would like to hang out while im there just let me know.