Anyway, I hope the startup you're killing yourself over is going well!
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!
We are actually very very significant. We are, as far as we can tell, the only thing that actually notices the universe!
This whole enormous universe? It's for us. (And other intelligences, if they exist.)
I imagine the experience would be so much better in VR.
It was at once exciting and absolutely terrifying. This doesn't quite capture that feeling, but it's still pretty neat.
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.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star-sizes.jpg
- http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/gallery/star-sizes/
It is incredible to consider that the largest known stars are the size of the Solar System.
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.
- http://www.astro.uvic.ca/~tatum/stellatm.html
- http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9604b/
- http://herschel.cf.ac.uk/results/betelgeuse
- http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/starold_2.html
- http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=wien+displacement+law
Weird; in case of a space sim this should be a simple thing to fix (octree, for example).
[1] http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands [2] http://farlandsorbust.com/
-Blaise Pascal, 1669
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex#Total_...
> 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."
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=scale+of+the+u...
At least this is the more accurate version at the top end of the scale.
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 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.
