A colossal rock party happening in outer space, and that seems bad

May 25, 2021 3:25 PM

11 Size Comparison Videos
posted by box (16 comments total)

Cool!

Also, related to the first video: the Wikipedia article on Earth impact events.
posted by darkstar at 4:04 PM on May 25, 2021

I was looking forward to some new content, but the only one I haven't seen yet is the one about sea monsters.

I got youtube algo'd into these via fictional spaceship size comparison videos
posted by thecjm at 4:48 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is very relevant to my household. My four-year-old looooves the space size comparison videos. He’ll burst into my office and shout “UY SCUTI!”

He’s also into sorting things. He arranges long processions of random objects along the floor, or the bed, or the dining table, ordered by ascending size. I had no idea this was a thing other kids do, too.

We’re going to enjoy all of these other size comparison videos.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 5:02 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

My favourite real-world instance of this is at the Siding Springs observatory near Coonabarabran in central-west NSW. On the road in there are to-scale fibreglass globes painted as the planets, placed in proportional distance to the observatory as if it were the Sun, so you approach the place as if as an intersolar visitor. 'Hey, there was Mars', several kilometres later, 'yep, Earth'.

Uranus is all the way out on the way to Dubbo (hurrr hurr hurr)
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:18 PM on May 25, 2021 [2 favorites]

The currently-under-construction buildings in the tallest buildings video remind me of that Cordwainer Smith SF story where Earth hires some alien contractors to build the largest space-capable reusable rocket ever conceived. By the time it's done, which takes many years, the Earthers realize the resources needed and the environmental damage from launching it are just not worth it, and so they make it into an office building.
posted by jabah at 5:51 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Of course asteroids are pumped up. They have steroids built right into their name.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:27 PM on May 25, 2021 [9 favorites]

Kinda neat that the Asteroid comparison finishes with Ceres, right where the Universe comparison begins.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 6:34 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

This one of the solar system, showing not size but distance, laid out to scale in the Nevada desert is quite nice as well.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 6:38 PM on May 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I was really surprised that the Chicxulub crater was so small, I expected it to be much larger.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:57 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Vatican City as a planet(oid) looks like it was Katamari Damacy'ed.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:46 PM on May 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

A thing I can't recommend enough is watching a batch of these while signed in to a YouTube account, as a palate cleanser for your algorithm profile. Your Recommended queue will thank you.

Here's a classic from the 16mm educational film days (or screened right before a showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey for an audience that's waiting for their recreational psychoactives to kick in):
Powers of Ten (1977)
posted by bartleby at 7:49 PM on May 25, 2021 [6 favorites]

Small is beautiful: this slider-scale from U.Utah goes from coffee-bean to H₂0. With such data you can calculate how many [insulin?] receptor molecules can be plugged into the membrane of a cell. I think the ratio is about raisin:classroom.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:50 PM on May 25, 2021 [3 favorites]

I never had a visceral sense of the size of a blue whale until I compared it to the length of the short side of a city block, as I looked down from my apartment window. A blue whale is ~30m long, which is about the length from one intersection to the next.

The universe video unfortunately goes from the Milky Way to IC 1011 to the Bootes Void to the entire universe, which skips over something I had no idea was a thing: the macro structure of the universe. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which is part of the Virgo supercluster, which is part of the Laniakea Supercluster; superclusters form galaxy filaments, and between filaments there are large voids. The largest named structures are called "great walls". If you backed up enough to visualize it, it would look like a gauzy mess of greater and lesser density.
posted by fatbird at 7:47 AM on May 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

...that Cordwainer Smith SF story where Earth hires some alien contractors to build the largest space-capable reusable rocket ever conceived.

I must gently correct you, jabah, but I believe you have conflated a mention of a billion ton spaceship in Smith's The Ballad of Lost C'Mell with Earthport -- the mile high tower which the Daimoni later built for the Instrumentality, where the planoform ships whispered in from the stars... -- which featured in his wondrous novella Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.
posted by y2karl at 8:58 AM on May 26, 2021

Hey y2karl, you inspired me to look it up. In The Ballad of Lost C'mell, Earthport actually *is* the billion ton spaceship, just repurposed as a building. That's what those towering buildings in Dubai and Saudi Arabia in the videos reminded me of, although it's been three decades since I read that short story, so I wasn't sure. As Borges said, memory is mostly made of forgetfulness.
posted by jabah at 4:15 PM on May 26, 2021

So, the four sentences of the first paragraph on page 343 here reads:

Earthport had been built during mankind's greatest mechanical splurge. Though men had had nuclear rockets since the beginning of consecutive history, they had used chemical rockets to load the interplanetary ion-drive vehicles or assemble the photonic sail-ships for interstellar cruises. Impatient with the troubles of taking things bit by bit into the sky, they had worked out a billion ton rocket, only to find that it ruined whatever countryside it touched in landing. The Daimoni -- people of Earth extraction, who came back from somewhere beyond the stars -- had helped men build it of weatherproof, rustproof, timeproof, stressproof material. Then they had gone away and had never came back.

Unfortunately page 342 from there is blank but another quote from here adds a preceding sentence that reads

...Earthport stood like an enormous wineglass, reaching from the magma to the high atmosphere.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary but to me a wine glass reaching from the magma to the upper atmosphere is an odd design for a billion ton rocket.

I will add this -- the silent alabaster giants which Severian encounters at one point in Gene Wolfe's The Book.of the New Sun brought the Daimoni to my mind when I encountered them. And in that series, by sheer coincidence, was where the towers of the city of Nessus were indeed ancient starships.

At any rate, we will have to agree to disagree. Five sentences is not enough for either a torch or a pitchfork.
posted by y2karl at 7:37 PM on May 26, 2021