Just how big is space?

Click on this BBC link to find out.

Warning: Very Big picture, takes time to load. SFW

Have fun!

If you want to go out even further, this scrollable Flash animation gives you a much wider perspective of the size of the Universe (and also in the other direction down to the Planck length).

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

The VERY thing I came in here to post!

And of course there’s the Power of Ten.

I’m in space!

(SFW)

Not as big as your mom! Booyah! :smiley:

Everybody lives on a street in a city
Or a village or a town for what it’s worth.
And they’re all inside a country which is part of a continent
That sits upon a planet known as Earth.
And the Earth is a ball full of oceans and some mountains
Which is out there spinning silently in space.
And living on that Earth are the plants and the animals
And also the entire human race.

It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.
It’s big and black and inky
And we are small and dinky
It’s a big universe and we’re not.

And we’re part of a vast interplanetary system
Stretching seven hundred billion miles long.
With nine planets and a sun; we think the Earth’s the only one
That has life on it, although we could be wrong.
Across the interstellar voids are a billion asteroids
Including meteors and Halley’s Comet too.
And there’s over fifty moons floating out there like balloons
In a panoramic trillion-mile view.

And still it’s all a speck amid a hundred billion stars
In a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
It’s sixty thousand trillion miles from one end to the other
And still that’s just a fraction of the way.
'Cause there’s a hundred billion galaxies that stretch across the sky
Filled with constellations, planets, moons and stars.
And still the universe extends to a place that never ends
Which is maybe just inside a little jar!

YW+D : It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney.

  • Though we don’t know how it got here

  • We’re an important part here

  • It’s a big universe and it’s ours!

    • In the original script, these lines were:

YW+D : You might think that you’re essential
Try inconsequential
It’s a small world after all!

Think the first 15 or so second of this safe for work commercial is another way to answer this.

Goddamnit. There was a flashback I didn’t need to have. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hmm..

Deep.:wink:

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

It evokes such poetic responses!

:cool:

It’s this big:

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That’s the space bar. Not the same thing.

Space bar? Is that where I can get a pan-galactic gargle blaster?
[The effect of which is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon, wrapped around a large gold brick if I remember correctly…]

Aw, c’mon! Everyone needs an Animaniacs flashback!

That’s the second biggest space I’ve ever seen.

You could almost park two cars in it!

I think Carl Sagan said it best…
http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/pale_blue_dot.html