"What is a man in the infinite? But to show him another prodigy no less astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let him take a mite which in its minute body presents him with parts incomparably more minute; limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops; let him, again dividing these last, exhaust his power of thought; let the last point at which he arrives be that of which we speak, and he will perhaps think that here is the extremest diminutive in nature. Then I will open before him therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the enclosure of this diminished atom. Let him therein see an infinity of universes of which each has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; in each earth animals, and at the last the mites, in which he will come upon all that was in the first, and still find in these others the same without end and without cessation; let him lose himself in wonders as astonishing in their minuteness as the others in their immensity; for who will not be amazed at seeing that our body, which before was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, is now a colossus, a world, a whole, in regard to the nothingness to which we cannot attain."
Your comment just made me smile and exhale with a sigh of relief. You hit my sentiment exactly. Sometimes I don't know why we waist it all for silly business ventures instead of enjoying the splendor that the universe has to offer. It's baffling to me. Though, starving sucks, but do we need to try so hard to do such insignificant things (in general)? It's probably why I won't spend my time trying to write another Tetris clone in some obscure language; it's been done, move on. :-) Let's make a real difference so we can spend time reflecting and getting our minds blown by reality.
Depends on whether you are comparing everyone to each other or to something outside of the group of everyone. I could imagine we would say that everyone is important as compared to a typical stray photon with a duel-identity crisis.
False. A group's ability to survive a cataclysmic event, natural catastrophe, epidemic, or genocide depends on its size and diversity. There is safety in numbers and diversity.
> to comprehend the scale of the universe is deeply unsettling, especially when thinking about our minute, insignificant part of it
Humans are 10^27 times smaller than the observable universe, and 10^24 times bigger than the neutrino, presently the smallest observable thing, and 10^35 times bigger than the smallest theoretical distance, the Planck length. That puts humans around the center of the Universe's scale, hardly minute and insignificant, and one could argue on that basis the human brain, even mind, is at the conceptual center of the Universe!
Consciousness and life are two miracles of existence that neither the galaxies, nor the atoms seem to manifest. Probably most life forms on earth are not conscious either.
From that point of view we seem to be a miraculous needle in the haystack of the universe as we know it.
The property of the universe to become capable of self reflection after billions of years of non-intervention is just mind blowing. Life is the most amazing thing. It's as if life and consciousness are inherent emergent properties of certain systems. If you create a complicated enough state machine with low enough entropy (i.e. the universe), the ability to self reflect simply seems to emerge after a while. It's as if life just wants to exist. Amazing.
As for animal consciousness, there are probably degrees of that. Humans are probably the only living beings on Earth that are capable of higher order reasoning and self reflection (meta-thinking). That's not to say animals aren't conscious; they probably just aren't able to reason about the world and their own existence the same way we are (since their brains aren't as developed). In the same vein, who is to say there aren't beings in this universe capable of reasoning on such a high level that even with sufficient explanations, our brains wouldn't be able to accommodate such reasoning on the biological/hardware level due to a lack of proper circuitry.
They may not be self-aware, but it seems reasonable to assume that animals like dogs (for example) have inner lives, after their own fashion, and are capable of experiencing qualia. Certainly more reasonable than to assume that they can't.
It's probably because the only animals YOU ever see are the ones in your dining plate. If you studied animal behavior a little you'd maybe realize how wrong you are.
I guarantee you other animals are first-class conscious. I can't prove it to you, but that's a problem with epistemology, not a problem with the other animals.
When I was a little kid, I used to lay in my bed, in the dark, and think about the size of the room around me. Then I'd think of the size of my house, then the size of my hometown, then the size of my home state, then the size of the United States, then the size of the planet, and so on until I couldn't conceive of the scale of what I was trying to envision.
It was at once exciting and absolutely terrifying. This doesn't quite capture that feeling, but it's still pretty neat.
Fascinating! Since childhood to this day, I use that same technique to ease myself into falling asleep. Personally, I see it as more relaxing than terrifying.
For me, terrifying can be read as a synonym for thrilling. It didn't scare me so much as fill me with awe, and delight, and any number of contradictory feelings.
Unfortunately, nowadays, I fall asleep much too quickly to contemplate the nature of universal size like I used to be able.
a large new space has a lot of unknowns -> some of these unknowns could be dangerous -> a very large new space has a lot more unknowns -> very large spaces are to be feared.
This is based on nothing more than my imagination, but seems like a sensible evolutionary precaution.
I tend to think that it is instinctual, probably related to the vastness of the thing, and the fact that it is simply beyond our ability to grasp completely.
> 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... which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is. 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 mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
The pictures of the largest stars are not realistic, since they show a clear border of a solid object. In reality the out parts are more like a very thin atmosphere. The average density of the whole star is almost vacuum( 1000 times less than earth atmosphere ).
True; an entirely accurate model would be quite time-consuming. For example, a red giant's photosphere is not spherical.
Niel deGrasse Tyson offered the following feedback:
> If the Sun's Wien's law curve peaked just a few Angstroms over from it's current value would you have illustrated it green? But of course there are no green stars even though the curve peaks there for plenty of them.
> The width of the visible part of the spectrum is so narrow compared with the full-breadth energy distribution of the stars that the fractional difference between one color and the next is quite small. The consequence is that we don't actually see all the colors you show.
It actually always baffles me that so much of biology takes place on scales that are very close to human perception. When looking at microscope images, the sizes of things become very abstract. Atoms and cells might as well be of the same size.
But a 0.1 mm object is perceptible to the naked eye. This resolution is just an order of magnitude too crude to see individual cells (the human egg cell is just barely visible to the naked eye), and two orders of magnitude cruder than the resolution limit of optical microscopes. Imagine how differently science might have progressed if we had known about cells before inventing the microscope!
I disagree. The user interface is poorly designed. It immediately slides everything past in a blur. I wanted to look from smallest to largest, but when I click the icon to go to the smallest scale, I'm asked to "restart". If I use the scroll wheel and get to the smallest scale, I'm also asked to restart. When I restart, I'm shown the blur of objects again and have to go through the entire process over again.
I liked the first one, and I think this version is very good looking too. Good job.
I suggest you add a "play" button, where it scrolls from one end to the other at a slow pace, much like in the first iteration. It's nice to sit back and enjoy the view.
You can try I-War 2:Edge of Chaos( space action-simulator with newton physics and inertia ) where the total contiguous world map is around 10^20 km( at least ). But of course most of it is empty as the solar system takes a relatively small place in the center of the map. And similarly to Minecraft if you teleport yourself into the high numbers you will get experience floating point accuracy problems, and weird things start to happen.
Going from the center of an MC map to the edge would take over a month of continuous walking [1], so I don't think there's much motivation to create anything larger. I have never heard of any situation anyone even reached the end of an MC world without explicitly teleporting there, although one man had been traveling there for the last 3 years [2].
You must try "Celestia" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/). Its a real-time visualization and simulation of space! OF SPACE! You can see the entire known universe with this!
For anyone with access to an Oculus Rift, I can't recommend "Titans of Space" highly enough. It brought me to tears. The sense of scale you get is utterly amazing.
That largest bacterium's size is incorrect. It shows a chain of them as 750um, but in reality just one can become that large. In the picture, they look as big as a human ovum at 120um, but obviously that's not accurate.
-Blaise Pascal, 1669