Visualizing the Scale of the Milky Way

You may have learned that the universe is expanding, or maybe it's not. Not that it really matters to people like you and me, because it's already bigger than our minds can comprehend, and may as well be infinite. Toby Lockerbie, also known as Epic Spaceman, is thinking about the Milky Way. It's a tiny part of the universe, but in human terms, it's all there is. In this visualization, he shrinks the Milky Way to the size of the United States, since that's a size we Americans can understand. He also shrinks himself to narrate. While that's pretty mind-blowing in itself, the video is lovely and quite poetic as it explains the relative spaces between very big things. Plus there's a coda at the end to make us feel better about being so small. While we may be small, he assures us that we are far from insignificant. -via Geeks Are Sexy

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i believe u

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Last I checked, the limit of the observable universe is about 54 billion light years. That's about 4.6E24 miles, an incomprehensible distance. Our own galaxy, by comparison, is "only" about 125,000 light-years in diameter, or about 1.5E14 miles. Sounds really big on its own, and, by our scale, it is, but in the whole of the universe, it is less than a fly-speck. Talk about feeling insignificant.

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You can not comprehend the size of the milky way. I even doubt that a human can understand much more than 1 km or maybe 10, but that:s it. Even though you may vizualize it by increasing scales, í consider these vizualisations not helpful, as you only show the scale between two objects that both are beyond comprehension. But you always encouter this kind of problems when trying to vizualize something as large as a galaxy. However, i really like the effect of switching off the milky way, that is a really cool effect, very impressive and really shows how large the void behind the curtain of the milky way really is. .