I love this kind of stuff. It is nearly impossible to grasp the incredible vastness of space and time, but exercises like this help.

I can't remember where I first heard it, but if you extended your arms in both directions to represent the age of the Earth, the distance from the tip of one hand to your other wrist would be the Pre-Cambrian. Nearly all of complex life is in one hand. And with one swipe of a nail file, you could eliminate all of human history.

Very neat display.

Anyone ever try to build a model of a hydrogen atom to scale with a marble representing the proton? Where would you put the electron (assuming you want it situated at a radius of the average "orbital" distance)?

The vastness of space is very hard to get a grip on. The distances are too big to fully appreciate. About a year or two ago I worked out the dimensions of a scale model of the solar system to put things into perspective for some students. Scaling the Sun to 6' (height of person) in diameter, the other planet diameters and their distances to the Sun work out as shown below.

So for example, in this model Jupiter would be 7.4" in diameter and would be 1118 yards from the Sun.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star to our Sun.
Epsilon Eridani is the closest known star with a planet of its own.
Gliese 581 is the closest known star with a planet in the habitable zone.

As you can see, it is highly unlikely that we will ever physically venture outside of our own solar system, let alone cross the emptiness of space to a planet in another system. The distances are just too great. Likewise, it is highly unlikely that we are being (or ever will be) visited by beings from another world. As Bill Bryson put it, why would they travel the incredible vastness of space just to plant crop circles in Devonshire or scare the wits out of some guy on a lonely road in Arizona?

Fascinating stuff, much of which is speculation that can not be demonstrated in anything approaching an experimentally repeatable manner, but still fascinating.

From Bill Bryson's book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Awesome awesome read, btw), if you expanded an atom to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be the size of a fly. But the weight of that fly would be many times that of an actual cathedral.

Also from Bryson, if you expanded a baseball to the size of the earth, its atoms would be the approx size of grapes.

Even this freaks me out (Earth and Moon):



It's that far away.

This timeline is supported by multiple lines of evidence and certainly repeatable tests. What are you complaining about now?

Scale of the Universe - use scroll bar at the bottom to move the scale

http://scaleofuniverse.com/