Reminds me of the "Known Universe video from AMNH" So eye opening: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U
I wonder if anyone else had the same reaction I did, quite a few I would guess. Hmm.
The thing is, it is so enchanting, produces such a sense of wonderment, lulled by the music and so on, that as I approached the end of the sliding scale, with each step the animations taking a few moments to load... I started to think: what is lying in store for me at the very largest scale, what am I going to see? What message is waiting for me? What object gets designated the very largest 'thing' of all?..
...And then it hit me. Oh dear, this is April the 1st, isn't it. In that case, it can really only be one (category of) thing. It's going to be something like "yr mom's ass", or something, isn't it. An object, on whose vast cheeks the known universe is no more than a pimple. Yes.
And if I'd gone in the other direction, well surely I'd find something like "yr dick" waiting in store for me.
Gosh, I'd rather it isn't that, I really don't want it to be that. It was such a beautiful thing. But I see now that it has to be. As they say, it is in-evitable.
So that's what this is then. Just the winning move in some great 'Yo Momma' game between hackers that got way out of hand. I guess that's how marvelous things like this get built sometimes. Like Facebook. Spectacular works of man, haunted - poisoned, perhaps - by the sin of their creation.
Actually, now that I'm getting used to it, I like that in a way. I do like jokes like that. I like to tell jokes like that. Jokes where the humor is produced from a shocking scale mis-match, of truly cosmological proportions. In a way this is truly the Archetype for that kind of joke. And it's all the more exquisite when the only way it is able to spring the surprise, to so perfectly sneak past my joke anticipation detectors, is by the pure chutzpah of simply selecting scales so enormous that they don't register on my dials, and all the while I'm quietly sailing into a punchline. Actually what tipped me off just before I got to the end was the slightly too-good-to-be-true music, gently mocking me (plus my slow browser giving me time to reflect).
And so, as I moved the slider the final stage of its journey to the right hand side, knowing this inevitability, imagine my surprise to find that there was no punchline after all. And lo it was just a pure and beautiful thing, unsullied by cynicism.
It's a nice dynamic - all that scale and complexity out there, and its mirror image reflection in our tiny heads.
Define your point of reference for significance. Considering we may end up producing the beings and machines that colonize much of the observable universe, I think we can be pretty significant from the view of a hypothetical space monster thousands of lightyears away.
The real question is: how big would my monitor need to be to show the whole Universe when I am zoomed into that spacetime fabric?
If we filled the Universe with neutrinos, how many would fit?
xkcd had done this one - http://xkcd.com/482/
