Scale of the Universe

OMFG! This is fantastic! And apparently I have some things to learn about web design.

Magnificent! Curious how the zoom interaction is managed? Do you load assets of next level once zoom level hit a certain threshold?

See also:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb5qTdb6LbM ◄ AGE of UNIVERSE ► TIME in perspective

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)

Looks lovely!

Too bad there are no hits when searching for the "Restaurant at the end of the Universe" :)

This is amazing. I always have this thought experiment of taking this back like 200 years and imaging how people would react to the things we’ve discovered in our world and thinking about how much it would progress the technology of the era.

This is really moving! It's like a 2020s version of that old video[0] (there are 2!)[1] that zooms in and out of scale.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 (1977)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44cv416bKP4 (1996)

TIL the porcine virus is only ~106 carbon atoms wide.

TIL that the Burj Khalifa is taller than Vatican City is wide.

For a second I thought we'd seen a lot of the universe, the HDF being 1/5th the radius away and on googling Earandel is 2/3rds the radius... of the known universe.

"According to the theory of cosmic inflation initially introduced by Alan Guth and D. Kazanas, if it is assumed that inflation began about 10−37 seconds after the Big Bang and that the pre-inflation size of the universe was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire universe's size is at least 1.5×1034 light-years—at least 3×10^23 times the radius of the observable universe."

So, if true, all those metrics of atoms, stars, planets in the known universe are multiplied by 10^23.

Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once per knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different intelligent species - single planet to galaxy spanning empires - that would probably never meet another intelligent species (except those with the same ancestors).

I love the end of it, just a big circle of random static noise. Looking at stuff like this always brings up the question of why does anything exist at all?

My guess is all the assets are preloaded. They are gradually added to the "stage" and shrunken/faded out based on the zoom level on an item-by-item basis (vs zoom levels.)

The background color would be its own "item."

I actually came across this site because I was looking for an example for a proposal for a fun project for this guy: https://youtu.be/1kjvgWBHzec (he tried a couple of non-programming video editing methods to achieve the zoom effect.)

You'd probably be persecuted and hung.

I would imagine they'd be more surprised about the smartphone in front of their faces.

I just hope after extensive explanation and looking at the showcase they'd eventually ask what a Minecraft world was and why it was both flat and bigger than Earth.

The counterpoint to that thought is why we should think non-existence is even possible. There doesn't seem to be any indication that nothing could exist other than our capacity to imagine it being so.

It's what's so annoying with people arguing about "something from nothing."

Even a vacuum has zero point energy. The idea that there could even be 'nothing' at any point in time is arguably a bigger leap of faith than the notion of some deity for whose sake it is being argued as a presupposition.

I think it's some sort of a reference to the CMB.

I think this Zoom in/out physics story has pretty widely been told. Here is one by CPG Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

I like the one OP linked here. All the objects being clickable with a little description is nice

TIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.

"Something from nothing" is a flawed argument, I agree. It's just like saying everything came from ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ , because 'nothing' doesn't represent anything at all.

However, the idea that "'nothing' is impossible" still doesn't make sense to me. If the reality allows for infinite possibilities then one of the possibilities must be of 'nothingness'. This is what Buddhists argue, that reality is śūnya or 0/null/void, and that we exist only momentarily in this nothingness somehow but you can see how that argument is flawed too.

Then comes sāṁkhya that says there are 2 entities: The observer and the thing which is being observed. The observer (individual consciousness or puruṣa) is eternal, has no point of origin and no end. Similarly, prakṛti or nature also exists at the same time because the observer needs an observation but prakṛti's nature is to change all the time, it manifests and unmanifests (just like our bodies or everything else in this universe made of dead matter). However, even though prakṛti keeps this constant of change, the observer or puruṣa himself is unchanging (just like how our bodies and every single cell in it keep changing but the sense of 'I' remains the same somehow). On top of that, it says the prakṛti and puruṣa are mutually exclusive. They do not mix like oil and water but remain in contact at the same time, just like how we have material bodies that keep changing but the 'I' or the observer inside it is not made of prakṛti and hence remains detached from it. It is only the false-ego (or false-'I') of puruṣa that forces it to identify itself with prakṛti (like I'm a male, I have this job, this is my family, I have this body and face, etc.).

> if true, all those metrics ... are multiplied by 10^23

Considering the relation of radius to volume, shouldn't we add a meager 3 to make the exponent a total of 26? (Assuming of course that the universe is just a three dimensional volume. :D)

Cool.

And yet all humans alive, if packed like sardines, will fit in a 1 mile cube, with room to spare.

Physical dimensions can be an amazing un-intuitive thing.

Gosh, you're right.

Assuming:

- 5,250 can stand front to back

- 3,500 side-by-side

- 750 on top of each other

That's more than 13 billion humans you could fit in said cube.

And if you took each atom of all the humans alive and stacked them in a line (assuming 1 angstrom per atom and 7E17 atoms in a human), it would be roughly 60 light years long.

One of the best things I have seen on HN. Thank you for the link and who ever build this !

I never knew that a minecraft world was bigger than Neptune. Very neat.

What I find more interesting is when you get to the subatomic layer when it becomes apparent that it's all just theory and we have no idea what's actually here and we could be wrong but have no way of knowing...yet.

If something's not reachable with speed of light, it exists only in one's imagination.

If something's not emitting any information (black hole insides), it exists only in one's imagination.

That would get pretty stinky though.

The "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.

Death cults would be shocked to know this

I also like this site to show the scale of the universe:

https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem....

The second one is WOW. Thanks for sharing.

What kind of answer could even possibly answer that question?

Any answer is subject to the follow-up question, well why does that thing exist? Why did that happen?

If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in asking it I think.

Other questions about the physical laws governing the big bang or inflation or black holes can be answered, although they might be very difficult to answer.

Wow totally forgot that… but wouldn’t it be (10^23)^3 = 10^69!?

It seems all images are stored in the file https://cdn.scaleofuniverse.com/sotu-avif.dave with some format I don't really know. It's some kind of container for avif images. It's loaded once.

> What kind of answer could even possibly answer that question?

I don't know, but it's fascinating to think about.

If something is in imagination, where exactly does it exist? What plane and what dimension? Where is it situated and what's the extent of it?

"It's all in your head" might be one answer but that's the question, what plane or dimension is it? and why do we not see it anywhere externally?

The question is the launch off point for exploration. Just because a question is philosophical in nature does not mean it cannot be answered or that there’s no point in asking.

>If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in asking it I think.

how can you prove a question cannot be answered?

The issue is that even in your framing “…’nothing’ at any point in time…” is at odds with the Big Bang theory which says time had a beginning. How do you conceive what was there ‘before’ the universe came to existence? (In the absence of matter, space, time and energy)

> Any answer is subject to the follow-up question, well why does that thing exist? Why did that happen?

Various kinds of faith (religious, scientific, etc) can stop infinite regress.

> If a question cannot be answered, there's no point in asking it I think.

Easy peasy.

The problem is in words "at present". There's no some global timeline to say "present". The time in far away places just didn't happen yet.

UPDATE: minor consideration -- time can flow at different speeds (e.g. gravitational wells). That's probably doesn't matter to our discussion, but just another argument against "at present".

Did atoms exist before they were discovered, or not until after they were discovered?

This question could be applied to a number of things historically, and may even be in effect going forward.

Give every human an acre of land, and we'd all easily fit into Texas.

It's really simple.

The universe is based on Murphy's 1st Law: Anything can go wrong, including nothing.

"In the beginning there was nothing… Then something went wrong."

Neal Agarwal (Neal.Fun) did something similar a while back with cool WebGL effects. https://neal.fun/size-of-space/

That's a common misconception. The big bang theory does not say that there wasn't stuff before the big bang.

Simply that our local version of spacetime expanded in the great inflation.

And I'm not sure if you've been following the news on it, but there's some serious issues with the theory at the moment.

Warmly recommended version of the same thing in meditative video game form: Everything

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_(video_game)

Just because you dont see it, doesnt mean it didnt happen. The light the sun emits will only be seen by us ~8min later, but it's still being emitted right now.

Reachable with the speed of light from what inertial frame?

Also, there's been some interesting progress regarding information about the inside of the black hole possibly leaking out in the Hawking radiation.

There are 8 billion people on earth. And Texas is 172 million acres. I don't think the math works out.

You're right, I forgot my exponentiation rules: https://mathinsight.org/exponentiation_basic_rules#power_pow...

Has this been done with time rather than distance? I’ve always thought it could be a neat way to explore historical topics or quickly get a perspective on certain time periods.

nice...

The gray stuff. Is that where the Level Designers haven't yet created the environment for us to play in?

Seriously though as hard as the size of the universe is to comprehend, the gray stuff is exponentially more mysterious to me.

The many ways that protein can fold.

No, there's a mistake in the statement.

Counter-example -- what's happening _right now_ at a distance of 20 billion light-years from us?

Or another question -- what happened 1 hour _before_ the Big Bang?

Both questions are already invalid by themselves.

UPDATE: I should've tried to answer my questions to show what I mean:

1. At 20B ly from us there's no space nor time to talk about. Physicists talk in formulas, and I suspect if I knew how, I just wouldn't be able to come up with a formula to formulate my question.

2. "before" the Big Bang there was no time itself to say "before".

In other words, we can only reason about, or imagine, reason about things, within our light cones. Outside light cone questions become invalid to ask.

I always want to see something like this but within the scope of the earth across time.

It doesn't matter which 'serious issues' exist, no one has any explanation for why the future points to a high entropy version while the past point to a low entropy version. You can have issue with any particular issue of the big bang theory, but no matter what you put forth you have to answer the very hard question of 'why was entropy low', being that we know of no way in our current universe to reset entropy.

I believe it's valuable to think of this question in terms of how our physical reality really can't answer it. It's a tacit acknowledgement that the rules of the physical world we exist in are not universal; We live with causality, but for existence to begin it must not be a universal requirement.

Is the scrolling on mobile way too sensitive for anyone else?

> the pre-inflation size of the universe was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age

What is the basis of this assumption? Why should the universe be (initially) expanding at the speed of light?

Is the static noise just the edge of observable universe? That was unclear to me

Sort of.

The concept of simultaneity is mind-bending when you really dig into it [0]. The upshot is that the hard problem of synchronizing distributed systems is a problem of fundamental physics, rather than simply the capabilities of any given developer. Its always nice to know that the reason you haven't met some specification given to you by a non-technical user representative is because meeting that specification violates the known laws of physics.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

Also pretty hot, since if I remember correctly, the waste heat of a human is higher per volume (or was that mass ?) than of the sun !

The Prime Mover is a philosophical paradox even quite a bit older than postmodern physics.

Funny, just today I read about things like waves or energy being arguably on a "different plane of existence" than their medium/embodiment :

http://www.av8n.com/physics/black-box.htm#sec-plane-of-exist...

(Which made me realize how little I know about eastern mysticism...)

This is all a simulation, folks. The "universe", not the website. I mean, the website is inside the simulation, so it's technically a simulation of the simulation it lives in...

Something I recently posted on Bluesky in response to someone complaining about the exaggerated vertical scale of a relief map of the US:

https://bsky.app/profile/dahosek.bsky.social/post/3kqfzyvoz5...

> It’s worth noting that the coast-to-coast measure of the US is a bit under 3000 miles, while the highest elevation in the continental US is a bit under 3 miles above sea level, so in a 1000-pixel map, that would translate to a 1 pixel height for Mt Whitney!

> So that difference in elevation is less than the diameter difference of the earth due to its rotation! A billiard ball has a diameter of 2in and the variation in the earth’s diameter scaled to that level would be 0.0066in which is smaller than a dust mite.

> I should also point out that the diagrams that show the earth’s elliptical orbit are also a lie. Drawn correctly proportioned, the earth’s orbit is indistinguishable from a circle to the naked eye. (And don’t get me started on the pictures that overstate the size of sun & planets vs their orbits).

> The universe is huge, we are tiny.

> The second one is WOW.

Indeed! Now assume that the many-worlds interpretation is accurate and you will live through most of that, if quantum immortality [1] turns out to apply to the real world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortalit...

The speed of light is the same in all inertial frames.

How would you determine if the Universe is finite or infinite?

Can't we imagine a bag of clocks at the Big Bang origin that were synchronized and allowed to travel in all directions along with various sections of the ejecta, including one on Earth? One could imagine events that happen at the same clock reading as ours in all the different parts of the visible and non-visible universe.

Similar app from https://kurzgesagt.org/ for phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kurzgesagt...

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/universe-in-a-nutshell/id15263...

What's interesting is that they both chose very similar music. Are they somehow related that I am unaware of?

Faith can stop you asking the question of why God exists rather than nothing, but it can't actually answer that question.

This particular question cannot be answered definitively because any answer is subject to the same question - why does that thing exist rather than nothing?

> Just because a question is philosophical in nature does not mean it cannot be answered or that there’s no point in asking.

I never made any claim starting from the premise that the question "is philosophical"

I directly explained why the question can't be answered definitively.

Lots of philosophical questions actually can be answered.

Love the fact that the known universe is much more smaller (10^-35) than it is bigger (10^27) from our chosen baseline.

We (the humans) would fit into Texas regardless of whether the land we owned would ;-)

The effects of relativity cause that thought experiment to fall apart quickly. I build two clocks, and send one to alpha centauri and back in a spaceship. When the travelling clock gets back to Earth it will be showing a different time (because of time dilation during acceleration). What does "the same clock reading" mean then?

Not only too sensitive, but it also seems to have a mind of its own. I gave up after trying to move around for a few seconds. I was already disappointed that it wouldn’t load without having to disable all tracker/analytics blocking.

> Even if intelligent life were rare enough to only appear once per knowable universe, there could be 10^23 different intelligent species

The search space of complex organic molecules grows exponentially with size. All that difference creates is some marginal space between molecules with hundreds of monomers and hundreds of monomers + some 4 or 8 where life could fit that.

Your revision of 10^70 makes it a little bit more believable. But I wouldn't expect at all that to happen.

You mean stuff like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation

People don't spend much time on those theories because they are inherently of little practical consequence. What includes that they are also not clearly testable.

Distances are not.

Interesting, I thought it was only Guth that introduced inflation.

Sounds good!

Even physics has limits because our physical reality and approach has limits. Not everything can be a controlled experiment, especially things that are way beyond what our senses allow.

So in the end, everybody's theory holds 'almost' the same weight. We're all clueless, yay!

The moment we ask why, it has to have a reason. However Vedānta for example, would argue that brahman or the entity that is the cause of all causes, is causeless in itself. There can be no other explanation.

If something has a cause then it's ruled by cause and effect. If something is causeless, it not only does not need a reason to exist but is also the entity that puts forth cause and effect in motion. Kinda similar to Aristotle's concept of the prime mover.

Eastern philosophy understood it quite early, you can only go so far with cause and effect.

Brahman, Prime mover, are great explanations as to why there must be a causeless entity, something that is not ruled by material nature in order to be the causeless source of it. The cause of all causes that is causeless itself.

It can certainly answer it, but whether it can answer it accurately is another matter.

To make it even trickier: it isn't only religious people who are affected by faith, though clever word play, cultural norms, etc can make it appear otherwise.

loading everything upfront (a loading bar) was a better trade off than having unloaded images if you scrolled too fast.

making each image a separate file was not very efficient for basically every reason. i ended up writing my own streamable archive format called an "asset bundle". it is essentially all resources concatenated.

that code is public -> https://github.com/paperdave/assetbundle

the scale of the universe webapp loads all the assets, but then pixi.js objects are dynamically created and destroyed depending on the scale. i never fully verified but i hope does the right thing and keeps sprite data out of vram when it's not needed.

915 square feet is still enough for some solar cells, a bio digester, an aquaponics setup with vegetable garden, a cabinet full of quail, a cot, a rocket stove, and a small shed.

But if you pack the same atoms in a cube, that's 17 centimeters. ((8e9*7e17)^(1/3)*1e-10=0.17)

It's totally possible that such clocks could then touch each other in one place, while both showing widely different readings. Which one is right then?

PS: by the way, Poincare proved that there's no way to synchronize clocks perfectly, only up to a some margin.

Yes of course they won't show the same time if you bring them back. But the point is to argue that it is possible for there to be a "right now," as defined by what the traveling clock shows, outside of our light cone.

A contrasting take on it afaict:

https://share.snipd.com/chapter/ceddc8a8-939b-48c7-8cea-45d7...

Doesn't seem much contrasting. Dao concept sounds quite similar to the concept of Dharma outlaid in Bhagavad Gita.

Wu-Wei sounds very much like Karma Yoga and Yin-Yang too. It's all very much like the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.

Late reply but my original numbers were wrong, it’s 7E27 atoms in a human according to wolfram, I think I just misinterpreted its original output when I tried to put it all in one formula: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+many+atoms+in+a+hum...

The answer is still close to 60 LY (73.99LY) but it changes the cube size significantly:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%288e9*7e27%29%5E%281%2...

(8e9*7e27)^(1/3)*1e-10 = ~382 meters on each side of the cube.

Contrast the uncertain sentiment in your last comment with "has to have" and various other "facts" of questionable origin above.