Strings/Universe: Which am I closer to in size?

Seconded.

Star---->Proton---->Planck mass

Ratio? And why?

I’ll probably botch something here, but here’s my understanding:

Everything is moving away from everything else that’s not gravitationally bound to it. Space is essentially being created everywhere, in every direction, to the tune of 72km per second per megaparec. (See Hubble’s Constant). In effect, this means that the further you are from something, the more space between you and it is being created, and hence the faster you’re moving apart. The velocities of the objects moving away combined with more space being formed between them can mean that their total velocity relative to each other can exceed the speed of light.

So our “observable universe” isn’t limited by our technology to view it, but rather the light from some parts of the universe will never get here because space is being created between us faster than the light can travel. The universe could be orders of magnitude greater than what we see, and we’d never know it by direct observation. We think we may have some idea of the size, but it’s based on inferring a lot of stuff and may be flawed.

Cosmic inflation plays a role here, but I don’t understand it well enough to describe it properly.

The two answers use two criteria. The first one answered in terms of magnitude, while the second was in terms of absolute size.

Yes, I was aware of that, but it was entertaining because the thread was already down one path, so when I read that response, it took me a second to shift models and realize that, not only did the math make sense, it technically answered the op correctly.