I need a SCIENCE! icon.
This morning I had an odd dream, in which I was talking to someone of a religious bent, and I was commenting about how Jesus "stopped by and visited this eyelash here." The theist humored me, in my comment about how small and ordinary the earth is, in the grand scheme of things. I woke up shortly thereafter, and today I was thinking about if my subconscious was wrong with the math. Turns out it's even more impressive in how unimpressive the earth is. While the intent of the math was somewhat philosophical, it's still quite interesting.
We live in one galaxy among many, with a radius of about 51,000 light years. Just being our galaxy, it's still a large ratio. Wolfram Alpha reports 75,000,000,000,000 to 1. How small is the earth? Well, if we were to shrink the galaxy to the size of the earth, all of the earth would have a radius of 84 nanometers.
In other words, the earth is to the galaxy is smaller than a bacterial cell is to the earth.
I spent a good portion of the day looking at the Hubble Deep Field, of 4000 galaxies, all relegating the earth to sub-microscopic status, lurking in a blank patch of unimpressive sky.
Based on red shift and the work of Hubble's namesake, we estimate that the deep field is roughly 46 billion light years away. If we were to shrink the size of the visible universe to the earth's size, our galaxy would fit inside a baseball diamond. The earth itself would fit, end to end, inside a hydrogen atom over 570 times.
Epicures, 3 centuries BC, proposed a philosophy that was an indirect agnosticism. He opined that we are so small, so unimportant to the rest of the universe that gods, if they exist, are so far and distant as to not have any affect, influence, or relevance. How appropriate that he believed in the concept of atoms.
We live in one galaxy among many, with a radius of about 51,000 light years. Just being our galaxy, it's still a large ratio. Wolfram Alpha reports 75,000,000,000,000 to 1. How small is the earth? Well, if we were to shrink the galaxy to the size of the earth, all of the earth would have a radius of 84 nanometers.
In other words, the earth is to the galaxy is smaller than a bacterial cell is to the earth.
I spent a good portion of the day looking at the Hubble Deep Field, of 4000 galaxies, all relegating the earth to sub-microscopic status, lurking in a blank patch of unimpressive sky.
Based on red shift and the work of Hubble's namesake, we estimate that the deep field is roughly 46 billion light years away. If we were to shrink the size of the visible universe to the earth's size, our galaxy would fit inside a baseball diamond. The earth itself would fit, end to end, inside a hydrogen atom over 570 times.
Epicures, 3 centuries BC, proposed a philosophy that was an indirect agnosticism. He opined that we are so small, so unimportant to the rest of the universe that gods, if they exist, are so far and distant as to not have any affect, influence, or relevance. How appropriate that he believed in the concept of atoms.