And it's no metaphoric question. I'm talking physical. How big are you?
Lets start with Aiko. She's 10 years old, but I think she's almost as tall as Sally. She's quite big for kids her age.
Bryan is 13. And I think by now he should be as tall as me. I met him a month ago, and he's just a cm shorter.
I am 21, and I'm 166 cm in height. My mom would call me a "bongsor," an Indonesian slang that means "huge."
Then comes my father. He's 174 cm tall. And I believe a picture is worth a thousand words.
And then there are the basketball players. Tall, aren't they? Here's a simple comparison.
Yao Ming is 2.3 meters!! He's taller than my door!! I fit nicely as his armrest.
How about someone from the bible famous for his size? Mr Goliath! Here's a comparison.
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| http://biblestudymagazine.com/interactive/goliath/ |
Almost 3 metres tall. Huge!
But he still falls extremely short compared to the largest animal in the world! The blue whale is known as the largest animal in the world now at 30 metres long and 190 tonnes in weight. Thats as long as a basketball court, and the weight of approximately close to 15 school busses. That's just another level of largeness altogether. Here's a cool site about blue whales! (Click)
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| http://malct32.blogspot.sg/2011/05/cancer-in-animals.html |
Cool yeah? But wait.
Put 3 blue whales in a row, and you get the approximately the height of a redwood tree, the tallest tree in the world.
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| www.wikipedia.com |
It's up to 115.5 m tall. I guess its about the height of a 25 story HDB? And the diameter of this thing could reach over 7 m. That's huge. You can fit a single bedroom in there. A spacious one.
I bet everyone knows Burj Khalifa. The tallest building in the world so far, it's 829.84 m. It's almost a kilometer long thing, standing vertically. It's over 7 times the height of the redwood tree!
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| http://worldconstructing.blogspot.sg/ |
At this scale, Goliath just fails in comparison. He's puny.
Yet, it's not even close to the size of things that I'm going to talk about. Hardly close.
Burj Khalifa's height times 10, and you come close to the height of our very own Mount Everest! It's standing at 8.848 meters tall!! And not just tall, it's huge as well. Everything else we've talked about to this point just disappears in comparison. It's peak reaches the clouds!!
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| http://www.explorehimalaya.com/blog/everest-views/ |
Another manmade thing which length is greater than the height of Mount Everest. The Great Wall of China. It's length is 21.196 km, almost 3 times the height of Mount Everest. And it's the only manmade thing on earth that can be seen from space!
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| http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall.html |
Take your time to view it. It seems to blend in with the environment but you'll see it.
The earth really is an amazing place. Looking at the whales, the trees, the mountains.. We're puny!
But not just yet. The magnitude of the things I'm going to talk about is about to blow your mind. Well, it blew mine.
If we walk away from our planet earth, there are kazillions of things out there. Here are a few to start with.
- A moon is a natural satellite that orbits a planet or smaller body, which is called its primary. It's shaped like a ball.
- Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones. It's pretty small in size. The largest asteroids are smaller then our Moon, and their shapes varies, unlike moons.
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| http://scienceblogs.com/ |
- A comet is a celestial object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust and, when near the sun, a “tail” of gas and dust particles pointing away. Pretty right?
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| http://www.universetoday.com/ |
- A meteoroid is a small body moving in the solar system that would become a meteor if it entered the earth's atmosphere.
- A planet is a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star. Eg. earth, mars, mercury..
- A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. Eg. our sun.
- A solar system is the collection of planets and their moons in orbit around a sun, together with smaller bodies such as asteroids, meteoroids, and comets.
Enough of the definitions. Lets talk SIZE.
Our moon is the second largest satellite after Io, Jupiter's moon. Other planets have their own moon, if you don't know already. It's diameter is 3476 km, and it's distance from earth is 384.393 km. Stretch 18 Great Walls and we can reach the moon. Is it far away? Depends on how you see it.
Yet it's the smallest thing for comparison in this video.
I love how Louie Giglio describes it in his sermon. Take some time to listen. It's great :D The comparison starts at 4.36.
Is your mind blown away already? Well brothers and sister, not just yet!
Let's continue with some more definitions, shall we?
- An oort cloud is a swarm of comets orbiting the sun at a distance of one to two light-years, proposed as a source of comets that pass near the sun.
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| www.arm.ac.uk |
- A constellation is a group of stars forming a pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure.
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| planetfacts.org |
- A nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in outer space, visible in the night sky either as an indistinct bright patch or as a dark silhouette against other luminous matter. In these regions the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become massive enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets, and other planetary system objects.
It's "an indistinct bright patch" viewed from earth, but here's a few of them and how they really look like. They. Are. Breathtaking.
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| The ring nebula. (fusedweb.pppl.gov) |
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| The rosette nebula. (atlasoftheuniverse.com) |
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| The crab nebula. (hubblesite.org) |
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| The pelican nebula (fuckyeahnebulas.tumblr.com) |
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| The horsehead nebula. (nasa.gov) |
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| The catseye nebula. (hubblesite.org) |
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| The eagle nebula. (sidleach.com) |
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| The pillars of creation, found in the center of the eagle nebula. (spacetheology.blogspot.com) |
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| The omega nebula. (en.wikipedia.org) |
- A galaxy is a system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction.. Here are a few. I think the nebulas are prettier, but still, these galaxies are amazing.
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| Our very own milky way galaxy! (atlasoftheuniverse.com) |
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| The meathook galaxy. (news.sciencemag.org) |
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| The sombrero galaxy. (bbc.co.uk) |
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| The andromeda galaxy. (solstation.com) |
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| The spiral galaxy (nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov) |
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| The antennae galaxy. (nasa.gov) |
- A dwarf galaxy is a small galaxy composed of up to several billion stars, a small number compared to our own Milky Way's 200–400 billion stars.
- The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is a dwarf galaxy. It has a diameter of about 7,000 light-years and contains several hundred million stars. It has a total mass of approximately 7 billion times the mass of our Sun.
.jpg/577px-Small_Magellanic_Cloud_(Digitized_Sky_Survey_2).jpg) |
| SMC. (en.wikipedia.org) |
- The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a nearby irregular galaxy (a galaxy that does not have a distinct regular shape) and is a satellite of the Milky Way. (So like how planets has moons, galaxies has satellite galaxies! How cool is that!)
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| LMC. (en.wikipedia.org) |
Yet, the scale of things we are going to talk about are still going higher, that even the unit of lightyears is still NOT ENOUGH!
*breathe
So instead, they use a unit called parsec, where 1 parsec is approximately 3.26 ly.
Which means:
1 kiloparsec (kpc) is approximately 3.260 ly.
1 megaparsec (mpc) is approximately 3.260.000 ly.
1 gigaparsec (gpc) is approximately 3.260.000.000 ly. That's 3 billion.
Lets continue, shall we?
- The Local Group is the group of galaxies that includes Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way. The group comprises more than 54 galaxies (including dwarf galaxies), and it's part of the Virgo Supercluster. Diameter 3,1 mpc.
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| The Local Group. The yellowish stars are from our Milky Way galaxy! (en. wikipedia.org) |
- Galaxy clusters are a group of galaxies, consisting of hundreds of galaxies bound by gravity.
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| Virgo Cluster. Radius 4,4 mpc. (en.wikipedia.org) |
- Superclusters are large groups of smaller galaxy groups and clusters. They are so large that they are not gravitationally bound.
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| Virgo Supercluster. Diameter 33 mpc. (en.wikipedia.org) |
- Voids are the empty spaces between filaments, which contain very few, or no, galaxies. The largest void is Eridanus Supervoid, with a diameter of 150 mpc. That's billions of lightyears. Billions of trillions of kilometers.
- And finally, galaxy filaments, also called supercluster complexes or great walls, are the largest known cosmic structures in the universe. They are massive, thread-like structures with a typical length of 50 to 80 megaparsecs h-1that form the boundaries between large voids in the universe.
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| Filaments. (top-topics.thefullwiki.orh) |
I find it so amazing how the largest known structures of the universe is called filament, which is the same as protein filament, something that we have in our bodies that is incredible small that it's invisible to the human eye. We can't see both, but it's in such a different way that we can't see it.
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| Protein filamen. (sciencephoto.com) |
I can't explain it. It's like I can almost see the humour in it! If we are created in God's image, and we have this thing called filament in us, it's almost like the greatest of the universe, the galaxy filaments of the universe, are just the size of protein filaments to God. It's almost ironic how the biggest things in our universe are the same as the smallest things known to us. It's like a cycle!
(And you can insist that both are still so different and the name and shape just happens to be similar. As you wish. This is just my whimsical thinking, you don't have to agree.)
Still, there are tons of other nebulas and constellations and galaxies and voids and clusters and superclusters and all other stuff!! Bazillions! And aren't each and every one of them a piece of artwork? They are just so BEAUTIFUL!!! He truly is the inventor of creativity!
Sure, they look lovely and sparkly from your computer screen don't they? But really, their sizes are of a different level. Blown away by VY Canis Majoris? Here's the continuation of the size comparison. Be prepared.
I tried searching for a good quality comprehensive videos of the nebulas and galaxies, but it's very hard to find, unlike the stars. Here's one which I think is quite well done, though the images are vectorized. The nebula comes in at 1:44, but you can always watch it from the beginning.
Here's a documentary by the Discovery Channel. Graphics are amazing, but not comprehensive.
Gosh, they're just amazing.
SO AMAZING!!That's why you should not underestimate nerds. They fall in love with what they are doing, and now I really understand why. I would happily classify myself as a nerd now.
It makes me wonder, why this size? Why the extravagance?
I personally believe there are no aliens. Even if there are other lifeforms out there, I don't believe it will be humanlike, or have a spirit like we do. Maybe more like animals. Personal belief.
I believe that God created this whole universe just for us. So why make it this big when we are just so tiny? Louie Giglio says it best.
If the universe is meant to magnify God, then it's just at the right size.
I can think of Him as a Daddy who has prepared tonnes of surprises for His kids to discover. And I can imagine His excitement while waiting for us to discover those gifts, and His joy when He sees us in awe and amazed when we discover what He has hidden for us! Like the joy you feel when you give someone a gift, and turns out they loved it. The happier you will be the more the gift is unexpected by the receiver, and the more in awe they are! And he has prepared the universe for generations of His children to figure out!
Really, the universe is just the right size to glorify Him. Just right.
And God, the creator of this brakagazibillion of lightyears of the universe, would come to this puny puny puny little pixel called earth, be tortured and died in the hands of an even punier beings called human.
Only so that He, can spend eternity, with us, this little speck tinier then an atom. Man, can you feel the love? Man I'm falling deeper in love with our Daddy!!!!!!!
And me, a design student, is now blown away by science! And who says science and Jesus are against each other? From what I see, it just shows the magnitude of our God! Do you know that this universe is in complete balance? And if the orbit of planets would change by just a degree, or the position of earth would just change just by a speck, it would be doomsday for us?
And sometimes I do feel stressed out of whatever things that may happen, but then remember! We are but a tiny speck of atom, and this huge God is with us, and this huge God is our strength, and this huge God loves us!!!! And he is MORE THAN ABLE to fulfill your needs!! MORE THAN ABLE! Can you see how huge he is? And more than that, He's MORE THAN WILLING!!! (Sorry for the heaps of exclamation marks, I'm just too excited!) If he would become a human, and DIED in such a disgraceful way by us, for us, this microscopic being, what would He not do?
I can go on and on about this.. But you get what I'm saying :)
He's a huge God, He's a good God, and He loves you!!
Be blessed! :D
PS. Here's a cool site, do check it out!
Scale of The Universe 2
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