

The scale of the universe, and everything - moblivu
http://www.ovni-alerte.com/blog/flash/scale-of-universe.swf

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lukifer
I never get tired of playing with this. (Though I can't help but want to port
it to HTML5.) ;)

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moblivu
Seriously, it amazed me everything. You see everything life, from he mesh that
holds the very matter to the limits of the universe; and you can control the
hole this, with a Flash slider.

Reminds me of the "Known Universe video from AMNH" So eye opening:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U>

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neuromorphic
This is _so_ beautiful, _so_ sublime, truly one of the jewels of the Web. And
yet...

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.

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moblivu
Trust me, this is pure! I was getting something in my bookmarks when I saw
that link. I wanted to share this marvelous piece of animation!

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michaelcampbell
This is one of my favorite "web things" ever. It is an awesome illustration of
how fundamentally insignificant we are.

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sho_hn
That's not my take-away when I get to see things like this -- rather, I always
find it pretty amazing that something as small as a human brain is capable of
holding (rough, admittedly) working models of and reason about something as
vast in scale :).

It's a nice dynamic - all that scale and complexity out there, and its mirror
image reflection in our tiny heads.

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prawn
I agree with both of you. It's not impossible to be both in awe of our
insignificance, and the capabilities of something so puny in the scheme of
things.

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michaelcampbell
Thank you - that's actually more or less what I mean, though I phrased it
poorly. I'm not so much depressed at our insignificance as quite in awe to be
able to KIND OF understand something so awesome (and so awesomely small). Or
at least have a meta-understanding of parts of it. =)

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Fargren
This gets posted about once a month here. It's very cool, but still...

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qntm
Also, I'm not impressed by the quality of the vector graphics.

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jrockway
Ugh, it plays music?

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?

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Rickasaurus
Where did they get 900 Ym for the estimated size of the entire universe?

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intended
Wow that was cool.

xkcd had done this one - <http://xkcd.com/482/>

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JoshTriplett
Warning: This link leads directly to a flash file.

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grantlmiller
and i'm stunned...

